


The Putative Earl

by Herself_nyc



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Angst and Romance, Angst with a Happy Ending, Captain Flint/Long John Silver Oooost referred to, Emotional, London Era (Black Sails), M/M, Past Miranda Barlow/Captain Flint | James McGraw, Past Miranda Barlow/Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton, Post-Finale, Post-Season/Series 04, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:41:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 34,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26753002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Herself_nyc/pseuds/Herself_nyc
Summary: It was only a Tuesday, a June Tuesday in the eleventh year of Thomas's imprisonment, with nothing at all to look forward to ....My take on the post-series James/Thomas reunion. Includes copious flashbacks to 1705, and a happy ending.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton, Miranda Barlow/Captain Flint | James McGraw, Miranda Barlow/Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton
Comments: 90
Kudos: 113





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> When I stumbled across Black Sails in the summer of the annus horribilis 2020, I wished I'd known about it sooner, when the show was airing and the fandom was most active. But I also knew I'd found it at the perfect time, just when I needed something to completely entrance, amaze and delight me.
> 
> James and Thomas seized my imagination. I hadn't written fanfic in quite a few years, but the impulse jumped right back up.
> 
> The circuitous way I came to it: BluePolygon, a fan artist whose Hannibal drawings I love, posted some drawings of Thomas and James. I saw a couple of stills and realized Thomas was played by Rupert Penry-Jones, whose work on Spooks and Whitechapel I'd already seen. I followed him to Black Sails. I recalled seeing the gold skull artwork on bus-side ads around NYC when the show was airing, but there was nothing about it that signaled to me that this was going to be, not just a show I'd like, but one of the handful of MY SHOWS OF ALL TIME.
> 
> Comments on this fic are VERY desired and welcome, and let's face it, needed _crack_ for us fanfic writers. 
> 
> Find me on Tumblr as Herself-nyc, on Dreamwidth or Livejournal as Herself_nyc, on Twitter @Herselfnyc1.
> 
> **This story is dedicated to Malkingrey, who helped me with feedback on some of the early chapters, and who passed away unexpectedly 10/31/20. We were long-time online pals from Buffy fandom days in the 2000s. She was a sane, funny, friendly person to know; we were followers of each others' Livejournals (both still active there) and an astute reader and accomplished pro writer (Deborah Doyle).**

Noticing that on each of his visits to his office, the man seemed fascinated by the little Dutch picture of the last century—a husband and wife seated at a table in a room with a chessboard floor and framed pictures on the walls, the light from a window falling just so upon her fur-trimmed afternoon jacket and satin skirt, their serious miens reproduced in the two children who stood with them, the boy holding a small fiddle, the girl a miniature dog—Oglethorpe, out of curiosity, asked him if he would like to have it in his own room. 

Thomas Hamilton drew back, embarrassed. As was his habit, he didn’t reply. Oglethorpe, who liked to think he was intensely interested in all of his inmates, though in truth some were more appealing this way than others, repeated the offer. The other man retreated in some confusion to the far side of the chamber. 

But on the next occasion (Oglethorpe met privately with each man once a month for a quarter hour, to hear complaints and requests, and to assess with each his moral progress), when again he was drawn to the picture as if it was the sole object or occupant of the place, Oglethorpe took it down from the nail and offered it. “It’s a pleasant little scene, attributed to Metsu. He excelled at these domestic interiors. It used to hang in my private chamber, but since I moved it here, I’ve seen how it attracts you. Should I need it back I will ask for it, but meanwhile you shall have the enjoyment of it.”

Hamilton took it as delicately as it was offered. His hands, though roughened by his work, retained their aristocratic postures.

“It’s very pretty,” Oglethorpe said, wanting to elicit some remark about it from the other man. Was it a fondness for the genre, the era and setting of the picture, that drew him, or something specific in it? Perhaps for him it represented the home and life he’d lost. Though according to his dossier, Hamilton’s marriage had not been blessed with children. 

He was too courteous to ask outright.

Hamilton nodded, smiled. There was something dreamy in his expression, Oglethorpe often noticed; as if, in his eighth year of confinement he still had the ability to absent himself from reality into some pleasanter mind-place. Along with his good looks, which Oglethorpe felt to be an influence upon himself and most people, Hamilton had a diffident grace that showed, despite how low he’d been brought, his inherent breeding. It made everyone here well inclined towards him.

“Good, good,” the warden said. “On your way now, Thomas.” 

From Hamilton there never were any complaints or requests, nor any need to discuss his morals; Oglethorpe, in his case, would’ve been ashamed to bring up the topic with him. He knew, as he did of all inmates, the nature of Hamilton’s case, but he preferred not to define his inmates as their sentencers had done. This man had never, he was sure, been truly mad. As for the other implication suggested in the papers, Oglethorpe preferred not to consider it one way or the other, feeling rather more humble than any other way, about the machinations and expressions of the human heart.

That he reserved judgment this way was no one’s business but his own.

~~~

Thomas hadn’t noticed the little picture until he’d been to Oglethorpe’s rooms a dozen times, and fully absorbed that during these meetings the warden made no feints at chastising or shaming him, much less subjecting him to physical “treatments” as he’d endured in Bedlam, but spoke gently, asking after his wellbeing and his wants.

Now that the Dutch picture was in his keeping, Thomas felt it a burden. He’d come to anticipate with a tingling reluctance and unexamined joy, the chance to see it in Oglethorpe’s office twice a month. Here in his own room, it seemed to draw all of the calm he’d worked so hard for in the years he’d been in Georgia, right out of him. He would, he decided, keep it turned to the wall. On Sundays, after his usual sermon reading and meditation, he’d permit himself to look at it for a few minutes—but only for a few minutes! With this resolve he leaned it against the wall behind the table in his room. 

The interior scene, the four people, man, wife and children, bathed in golden light, enclosed in such tranquil clean jewel-box intimacy, began to take on, each time he saw it, an importance, a size, far beyond its bijou reality. Even so, more time passed before he understood that this picture was not just a suggestion, but a sign. Was it not to reassure him that they were safe, and prosperous? Miranda, and James—and their dear children!—were all together in Amsterdam, where Peter had seen them settled with all they could want, just as he’d implored him to when he was dragged away by the Bedlam men.

Little by little, he came to equate the couple in the painting, though they were Dutch, and resembled his loved ones very little (though their respective colorings were correct and therefore significant), as their true manifestation. He liked to think that, though he somehow hadn’t been able to give her a child, Miranda had them with James; they would be happy in a wholesome, uncomplicated way (that didn’t bear much imagining into, as neither of his beloveds had ever been “uncomplicated”). Glimpsing the painting at the close of each fortnight was a reward for the care he took not to think of them, not to think of anything about the past, in between times. 

Thinking about James, except in this vague figurative way, still had the power to tear him to pieces.

He tried out different names for the children. The boy was older than the girl. Did not dare to think that the boy might be Thomas. Not, not, not, better not Thomas. For the girl, Marjory, perhaps. He liked that name … or Francesca, which was prettier than plain Frances. Miranda had liked that name, they’d talked about names in the first year of their marriage … or would they have chosen Dutch names, living in Amsterdam? Pieter, perhaps, in honor of Ashe who had helped them? Anneke, or Cornelia for the girl. 

Suddenly he wondered: why had the warden pressed the picture on him? Was it a test? A temptation? Some ploy to shame him? Ought he to renounce it? 

No no, had Oglethorpe meant to do so, surely he wouldn’t have waited so long.

Except that, since he’d been to Bedlam, Thomas found it difficult to be certain about anything anymore.

~~~

The visit of inquiry by the agent from the West Indies, looking for Thomas Hamilton, was followed, some time later, by a correspondence with the man who had dispatched him. Oglethorpe was enjoined to enroll an inmate who would be arriving, under guard, from the island of Nassau. The fee for his keep was paid a year in advance, with a promise of another year to be turned over on the prisoner’s arrival, on the condition that he and Thomas Hamilton, being old friends, should be granted complete freedom of companionship.

All of this was peculiar, falling rather outside of the remit of Oglethorpe’s institution as he’d conceived of it. The majority of the inmates of this special plantation were men from the first families of the empire, who, having fallen into errors that disappointed and upset their friends and relations, were consigned to his care, removing them from the scene of their sins, protecting them from further notoriety, and shielding their kinfolk from scandal. Though ostensibly self-supporting, each inmate responsible for a daily set of productive manual tasks of upkeep and progress, the plantation, set up as it was, would have been a rough and uncomfortable place indeed without the quarterly fees these outraged paterfamiliases paid to keep their sons, nephews and cousins out of sight and out of trouble. 

These amounts varied; at present, the remittances that came regularly from the solicitors acting for the Earl of Ashbourne, were among the most ample.

This new inmate was not, the correspondent confided, a man of birth or property. The reasons for sending him into semi-involuntary exile were, the writer explained, to do with politics of a local nature. But he was a former naval officer, well-educated, most able and enterprising. His reason could be appealed to. (In a parenthesis, the writer had hinted that it would be well not to challenge him with much to rebel against, as he was a proven efficient organizer.) Most important, he was so associated with Thomas Hamilton, that should their social intercourse be unobstructed, the writer thought it unlikely that the new prisoner should make any difficulties, but would instead be an effective addition to the plantation’s aims.

It was as much for the sake of curiosity as for the ample payment that Oglethorpe decided, with misgiving, upon trying this experiment. 

Oglethorpe sent a receipt for the money, and a letter asking for more particulars. Before any answer came, two stout armed men showed up one morning at the gates escorting the prisoner himself, in wrist shackles, lately off the ship at Savannah. Though in restraints, the man carried himself as if unaware of them; upright, his glance appraising, fierce, suspicious. Deciding to delay an interview to a later time, Oglethorpe directed that he be led out to the fields.

~~~

The night before last Thomas had sat by while some of the fellows had a sing-song, and this morning a verse kept running in his head; he let himself croon beneath his breath as he worked the hoe. _Oh little did my mother think, the day she cradled me, the lands I was to travel in, the death I was to dee …_ A step down the row brought him into a cloud of midges, he reached for his hat to wave them off, realizing he’d again forgotten it in his room. The doctor had warned him and warned him, and yet … _The day she cradled me … The death I was to dee … dee dee dee …_ He tried to summon up the ballad’s next verse. Then he heard, from the edge of the field, his name called.

Straightening up, peering into the glare, he saw a dark figure coming towards him along the row. An outsider, all in black, broad, bareheaded, hesitant. Who could this be, stepping on his work? He wore a hefty tooled belt, a red beard, silver glinted on his hands, what did he think he was doing treading like that on the turned earth? The fellow stopped ten feet off, staring. Thomas blinked, his vision awash, saw and didn’t see. 

It couldn’t be. 

The stranger came closer, and no, he was not a stranger, for those green eyes were known to Thomas, that expression of concentration, observation. _Oh how?_ It was as if the midges surrounded him again, obscuring his vision. It must be an aura, the prelude to another illness … his heart thubbed in his chest as if it had fallen over; a feeling he knew to dread.

Then the stranger, who was sobbing, clasping and clutching at him, was in his arms. Thomas embraced him all uncomprehending, this impossibility who was solid, reeking of sweat and salt. This apparition who, when Thomas clasped his head in his hands, opened his wet salty mouth to be kissed.

The field, the men, the heat, the lowering sky, his thirst, disappeared. James was kissing him. He was kissing James. 

How, how how? It was only a Tuesday, a June Tuesday in the eleventh year of his imprisonment with nothing at all to look forward to. Bewildered, they clutched and clutched, kissed and kissed. Waited to be torn away. Waited to be plunged into delirium.

Then came a touch on his shoulder. Mr Oglethorpe himself, with his administrative smile, his bobbing head in its grey wig, saying that he should bring Mr McGraw indoors, that they needn’t think of work and routine for the rest of today or tomorrow, though he would summon him for a colloquy later on. A brief cordial speech that served to separate them without much awkwardness, and restore all the details of the place and moment to their positions. 

Mr McGraw!

Yes, he would, as Mr Oglethorpe gently exhorted, show Mr McGraw into the house. Thomas did everything that Mr Oglethorpe, and his deputies, required of him.

Yet, once he’d let go of the man, his strangerness, his darkness, reclaimed him, and blink as he did, Thomas couldn’t quite see his face. Of course it wasn’t James. James, absurd! It was fever, personified …

_Oh little did my mother think …_

Walking back towards the house, Thomas cupped his hands over his eyes—why was he always forgetting his dratted hat?—to block out the sun’s slash. Even so he kept losing track of why he was leaving the field so early, at least an hour before the midday meal, and who this was supposed to be, walking beside him. He waited, almost patiently, for the first strike of the headache, or infection, this must surely be. He’d been pretty well just lately, compared to before, but his health was no longer something to be taken for granted; every ague that visited the place came to him. Sometimes he felt so light inside himself he wasn’t sure what was real. In sleep he felt awake, and at work he often fell into a kind of daze that thrummed time, reality, out of existence. 

When he gained the shade of the veranda, Thomas checked on the stranger again. Could it be? Oh, it was James! … Well, perhaps. So altered, so odd. Shorn and bearded. Gotten up like a devil. Reddened, old. Looking at him with such confusion, his lips twitching between smile and sob, tears enlarging his eyes. 

Thomas said, “If you are here, where then—where is—?”

At once he wished he’d kept silent. One couldn’t think in this heat, why couldn’t this have happened instead in winter time? If it was happening at all. It was too hot for this. All at once he was soaked in sweat, great beads of it rolling down his back inside his shirt, down his neck, dripping from his hair. The air burned, his vision boiled, skin melting. His legs shimmered beneath him and the boards of the veranda bent crazily beneath his feet.

“What’s the matter with you?” the stranger cried out, “You’re ill.”

He couldn’t catch his breath. In his chest, his heart struggled.

Then those boards were hard beneath his back. Very high above, the veranda ceiling wanted painting, big tatters of peeled whitewash clustered like moths clinging. The outsider in black whom he’d mistaken for James was bending over him, his head was cradled in the stranger’s palm. Wonderingly, Thomas touched the stuff of the shirt. Then he understood, and relief flooded him. It was as in the song. He smiled. That it should come to him like this, in this form, oh, it was pleasant, it was a mercy! 

“Ah—I see—you are my death—!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Dutch domestic genre painting that Oglethorpe lends to Thomas is a fictional one but inspired by the sort of pictures that are shown and discussed [here](http://www.essentialvermeer.com/dutch-painters/dutch_art/subject_matter.html)


	2. Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thomas is having a little trouble with the sudden appearance of James McGraw at the plantation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to all of you who read chapter one, ESPECIALLY those who left comments. (Please, everybody, leave a comment.)
> 
> Here's chapter 2. I'm aiming to update this every fortnight if not more frequently.

Hennessey had alluded once or twice, in ways that at the time had gone clear over James’s head , to what the Hamiltons were doing to him. That aristocratic pair, too worldly by far, were, Hennessey must have believed, certainly a colluding set of experienced seducers. They’d fixed on Lt McGraw, a promising officer a half-generation younger, lacking their _nous_. He was, not a virgin, but, at the time of meeting them, heart-whole. Focused on career and purpose in a way that skimmed over any notion of what personal life he might eventually want or acquire. They’d set to upon his naivety and in a short time, first she, then he, ravished and corrupted him utterly. That was, James understood later, how Hennessey saw it.

The truth: that they’d seen and befriended him as none ever had, brought out of him parts of mind that until then were only potential, and met them with the best of their own fine minds, would have been invisible to someone like Hennessey, and no less reprehensible if pointed out. That the capacity to love, and then to give himself body and soul to another man in joy and trembling, had lain within him unsensed, dormant, yet ready to flower, was impossible to explain. Impossible for Hennessey, for the empire, for the world, to accept.

In irons, below deck, all of this came back to James during the sail to Savannah. The weather was mild, the ocean placid, yet he was seasick and sleepless as if he’d never been on the water before. The men Silver had sent to escort him wouldn’t speak to him when they brought him food or changed his slop pail.

The abrupt stop to the desperate activity of the previous months was a whiplash, a crushing of sensibility, leaving him a rigid ball of contracted screaming muscle. Every thought was a rebuke, every memory sour.

Silver had promised him Thomas. Thomas, in exchange for the righteous war he’d already sacrificed so much for. And he, _idiot_ , had believed that great liar. So that now here he was in the belly of a northbound ship, his stomach turned outside out, head full of wasps, going towards prison.

What had he agreed to? To walk into a trap. He should have stayed, fought on and died honorably.

He wished he was dead.

~~~

Thomas, collapsed on the veranda boards, plucked weakly at James’s shirt front, his gaze nowhere. Then his eyes found him, and there it was, that smile of his that undid James inside, that he’d never thought to see again. But Thomas was pale, soaked, trembling, and the lids fell shut. “Ah—I see—you are my death.”

He seemed going to it with an acceptance so passive it was almost a will.

Had he come here only to hold him as he passed away? Repressing panic, James gathered him up. “No!”

Another man was there, helping him; they entered the big plantation house with Thomas slung between them. The warden tagged behind, _tsking_ , giving orders. They mounted the wide main stairs, carried Thomas’ limp body into a room, to a bed in a high corner chamber, its tall windows covered in slatted shutters. The other fellow splashed water over Thomas’s face; James pushed him aside and appropriated the pitcher. _Do not die! Don’t you dare!_

Thomas stirred, panting. His eyes opened and scanned the ceiling.

“I’m here,” James said. “We are alive. Both of us.”

Alive, but where was he? Thomas was as if caught in a dream.

James turned on the grey-wigged warden. “If he is so weak, why have you put him out in that field to get sun stroke?”

But then Thomas sighed, rose up on one elbow, and grasping the pitcher, drank from it, the water running down his beard, his chest, breathing in choked heaves.

James took it away from him. “Not too much at once.”

Collapsed again, Thomas went on staring at nothing, and seemed to be nowhere. James, the guards, the warden, watched him. Could he have forgotten him, all the old life? Was he not at all the same person anymore?

Then Thomas glanced around, and focused at last on Oglethorpe. “Sir, I thank you. I’m better now.”

“Shall I send for the doctor?” the warden said.

“No, I assure you. I will—when the afternoon bell rings—I will return to the field.” He touched the top of his head with the flat of his hand. “I _will_ remember my hat.”

“That you will not. Go into the field again today, I mean. I told you so already. Because your—friend—is here.” Oglethorpe gestured at James. Again Thomas looked at him, and again, there was that blankness, and then the perception of recognition that made him start, open-mouthed, as if they hadn’t already greeted, embraced, kissed, outside.

Mr Oglethorpe said, “You know him, do you not, Thomas? Your Mr McGraw.”

“ _My_ mister _—”_

“Here he is,” the warden said. “I thought it well that you should receive him—did I make a mistake?”

James heard then, in the older man’s voice, that he was fond of Thomas Hamilton, and the top layer of his hostility towards the man fell away.

“A mistake?” Thomas repeated. He blinked, and rubbed at his wet beard. He still seemed far off, even, James thought, oddly indifferent. He didn’t believe in this yet. “You make a mistake, Mr Oglethorpe? That’s unlikely.”

“Well then. I re-introduce you to this … ah, boon companion.”

Thomas followed Oglethorpe’s gesture and his gaze seized at last on James, and became fully intelligent. Tears sprang to his eyes. He sat up all the way, weeping and held his hands out. James seized them. They wept together.

The others left. James heard a key turned in the outer lock. They were alone.

Yellow stripes of light angled across the bare floorboards through the louvered shutters. Flies buzzed against the window glass. James glanced around. Though its furnishings were meager and utilitarian, the room itself was a fine tall wainscoted chamber with a large fireplace—no fire burning there now—and gave onto a small upstairs verandah. Odd that it should house a prisoner. Surely not all the inmates of this place were accommodated like gentlemen?

Thomas was shaking his head, his eyes awash. The sobs shook his body. He was holding now onto James’s arms as if to keep himself from falling.

James offered him the water again. Together they drank off what remained in the pitcher.

“You’ve had the malaria.”

Thomas seemed to hear only after a long delay. “I’ve had—yes, that.” He raised a hand in a frivolous almost drunken gesture. “I’ve had _everything_. It’s astonishing, what one can … not quite die of.”

His eyes again wandered the ceiling.

“I _am_ really here. Thomas?” Pitching his voice lower, James said, “ _My lord_.”

That did it. The wandering eyes fixed on his. Thomas frowned. James brought his face close. “You know me, don’t you? This is no delirium, I am not death. I am here. We are both here. Say my name.”

“ … James. James … McGraw.”

“Yes.”

Thomas put a hand up to James’s head, touched the cheek, the ear. Showed him that radiant smile. “James McGraw. My beau.” His old endearment, that shot a hot sweet bolt through James’ heart. “What’s become of your lovely ginger hair?”

“It will grow again.”

“I hope so, for I need it. Come here.” He tugged James’ sleeve to make him climb up beside him. The impossible was happening: he lay again with his cheek on Thomas’s breast. They let out simultaneous sighs. From beyond the louvers, sounds of dogs barking, someone whistling The Koo Koo Bird as he walked beneath the window, then fading away. The heavy air lay on them. Thomas’s sweat smelled like broken grass. A bell began ringing, summoning the men in from the fields and workshops for midday dinner.

Thomas’s hand rested on his head. James listened to the thub of his heart, realized how tired he was.

After a long silence, Thomas said, “Is she—” And stopped short.

James breathed around a stabbing pain. “Miranda is dead.”

Thomas’s fingers, pressing. “When?”

James knew the date, day, time to the minute, but said only “Not very long ago.” His throat became a fist of ache. His tears still rolled. “Please, can you—not yet—”

“I will hold my other questions in reserve.”

_You still understand me,_ _still guess my thoughts_.

He wanted to tell it all to Thomas, but he was afraid; afraid of that supreme storyteller Flint when he got going, afraid of grief, afraid of what, once known by Thomas, could not be unsaid. When Thomas knew how wicked he’d made himself, in his dear name, his love would cease.

_You gave your wife into my care, and I didn’t take care of her well enough._ Maybe Thomas would read this from his mind as well.

James pulled himself up so they were face to face. Thomas head lay crooked on the thin pillow, his eyes once more took a moment to remember to look into his.

Thomas was somehow less altered than James himself. He’d aged less, though was ruddier, rougher. When he asked him to, James thought, Thomas would shave off his scanty beard, which didn’t suit him. It came back to him then, how, when he returned from their other separation, that three month voyage that had seemed so long then and now so brief, Thomas had made much, teasing him, of his newly cultivated mustache and beard. But when after an evening in company with Miranda and guests, they were alone together, Thomas had showed, with his customary cheerful lewdness, how much it aroused him.

  
That night their last together. In the morning he’d gone to meet Hennessey.

The questions James wanted to ask Thomas now were all _Do you remember when?_ … He wanted to quiz him, to ascertain for certain that this was his same Thomas, that though they’d lost everything in their separation, they had not lost one another’s memorized selves. _Do you remember what you said to me, after that first time you kissed me and Miranda got up and left us alone? Do you remember how I almost fought you when you first began to take off my clothes? How I tensed and shuddered and almost groaned when you stroked my bare back for the first time? Do you remember which poems we read together, memorized together, in bed? What the names and addresses of the coffee houses we frequented late mornings, pretending we’d just met up for the day though we’d risen from the same bed and even helped each other dress? How we spoke affairs and politics to fellows there who didn’t know what we knew about secret joy? Who didn’t know that when I flushed it was because your knee was rubbing against mine beneath the table?_

Thomas said, “Except I cannot hold them all off. Is this really happening?”

“Yes.”

“Because I have had fever dreams that opium adepts would … envy. And fear.”

“It’s happening. I’m with you.”

“And in such a costume.”

“They took away my uniform, you know.”

“Oh—!”

“Don’t mind it, this get-up.”

“Where have you come from? How did you find me?”

This was the beginning of what James dreaded—the owning up. All these years he’d let himself believe that eventually he would cast off the persona of Captain Flint, and in doing so … that somehow that abnegation would absolve him of all Flint’s crimes? As if in seeing himself as two distinct persons in one body, that made it so. What a fantasy. What capabilities he had, to delude himself.

“Someone ... found you for me. I thought you were dead. When I learned otherwise, I came.”

“To take me home?”

James’s could not speak around the compression of his throat.

Seeing that, Thomas’s eyes went wandering again; he swallowed hard. “Will you stay with me here a while? Can you?”

“That is my plan.”

A rattling at the door, which opened to two guards with long guns slung over their shoulders. James had already leapt up at the first noise, but the incomers stared just as hard as if they’d been caught _in flagrante_.

“You—newcomer—are to follow me out to the washhouse. Those clothes and boots you are wearing you will turn over to me.”

James’s first impulse was to resist. But then it occurred to him that he was better rid of the trappings of his piracy; with them out of sight, Thomas might forget to ask about them again. _I will tell him, I will tell him,_ James assured himself, assured God, _But I will choose my moment._

Thomas tried to rise; he hung dizzily half up, half down, then dropped back onto his bed.

“You’re to wait, Hamilton,” the guard said. “This one will be returned here shortly.”

~~~

The sound of the lock on the chamber door was unfamiliar to Thomas; in the few years he’d lived in this room in the big house, he’d been one of the few prisoners whose privileges included unbarred doors, and the liberty, during certain times of day, of the plantation grounds. Dragging himself up, he staggered, seized the table, righted himself. At the window, he saw the two guards emerge from the rear verandah with James between them, heading towards the washhouse.

_Real, he is real, he is real. I see him, there he goes. They said he would come back._ Followed him with his eyes until he was out of sight. Realized that his shoulders were up by his ears, that his heart was galloping. An hour ago he’d been in the field with his hoe, and a quiet mind. He’d been … humming over that song. _Oh little did my mother think, the day she cradled me, the lands I was to travel in, the death I was to dee …_ He mouthed the words now, trying to slow the inner rushing that still seemed to presage a falling off into nothingness.

He knelt before the Dutch picture. It struck him how, on the floor with its front averted, it was like a naughty child put in the corner with his face to the wall. For penance, for shame. Taking it up, he half expected to find it altered; had the figures been gone, leaving only empty chairs in an empty room, he would not have been surprised. For there was no family safe in Amsterdam, no little Cornelia, no Pieter. And Miranda was dead. _Oh my darling wife._

His little bit of equanimity was all gone.

Bringing the picture to his face, he kissed it, and turned it back to the wall.

The lock rattled again, and Thomas rose, stepping away from where the picture was concealed beneath the table. The door was opened, and in came James, dressed in the prisoner’s shapeless clothes and shoes, carrying a basket. Behind him, a servant with a can of water. And behind them, the guard who, after the can was set down and the servant withdrawn, once more locked the door.

James set the basket down. “Our victuals.”

He still, Thomas thought, resembled a devil, even with the dark clothes, the grime, the blood, removed. James as he’d known him had often frowned, but not like this, a frown so worn-in that it was the face itself. He brimmed with terrible unknown things, things Thomas both wanted and dreaded to know—Miranda’s fate being, he sensed, only the first in a long chain of revelations, sufferings, losses. This would crush him. His heart tumbled in his chest, thoughts tumbled. How simple it all seemed for those few minutes on the verandah boards, when that manifestation of James was to be the agent of his transition to—heaven, or hell? He’d been almost sure, lately, that he was not for hell, but now …. Only it wasn’t that, it wasn’t that. Thomas made an effort, pushed through the confusion.

James was here, because__. He’d come from__. He’d been doing__. And now somehow he was here. All could be accounted for, in time.

Thomas unpacked the basket. Bread. Salt pork and bean stew in a covered dish. Greens. Apples. “You must be hungry.”

The table was small. There was only the one chair. Thomas looked at it, and at James. The cloud descended once more across his vision. A fist around his vitals. “I know I ruined your life—caused your life to be ruined.”

James startled; the frown deepened. Thomas was afraid of him, this fierce stranger standing so close. He stepped back. James said, “That isn’t true.”

Thomas flinched. “I fear it is. I know it is.” The tears sprang forth again in a helpless wave; he wished this wasn’t happening. He covered his face in his hands.

“Ah, this is too sudden for you, too much. They should have prepared you.” James plucked gently at his arm. Steered him back towards the bed. “Lie down, my dear.”

The bell sounded then, signaling the end of the dinner break; all the inmates would be returning now to their tasks for another five hours. Thomas collapsed gratefully onto the bed.

“Don’t think about it,” James murmured. “You will—we will—but later. Right now, let’s eat.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading -- please comment.


	3. Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> James explores Thomas's quarters, and his feelings about Thomas's proximity. 
> 
> James and Mr Oglethorpe size one another up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to my readers. Please be a commenter! If you like this fic, please rec it on social media. 
> 
> Thanks to Malkingrey for the beta read.

James sitting on the floor with his back against the bedstead, and Thomas lying on it, they ate the food. The silence, like the afternoon heat, banked up all around them. Sweat beads glided down James’ nose, his neck. When he turned around to take the remains of the meal from Thomas, he found him asleep with the half-eaten apple in his loosened hand, the empty bowl and spoon lying on the coverlet. His fair brow was crinkled, he twitched, as if he was pondering hard in his slumber.

James resisted an urge to wake him with kisses, to ask him for reassurance. He was a little shocked by these boyish impulses towards silly showy gestures of tenderness. 

What had they done to him these eleven years, that Thomas should be oppressed with having ruined him? James knew with a certainty who and what he blamed: the Earl of Ashbourne. England. Civilization.

Stretching out on the floor beside the bed, James fell into sleep. When he woke, the light was slanted, orange. A tendril of breeze came through the slats. Thomas hadn’t moved.

Rising, he looked around the room. Bare floor. Narrow bed, table, chair. A few items of rough clothing hanging from pegs. A wash stand with a small piece of soap, a wooden comb, a thin towel. A broom propped in a corner. Two half burned candles in candlesticks, with a fire striker and few more tapers lying close by. On the mantlepiece, _The Book of Common Prayer_ , a bible, and Hans Sloane’s _A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica,_ each containing the bookplate of Mr Oglethorpe, and all well-thumbed.

What he did not find: writing paper and pens, a looking glass, a musical instrument, a map, a timepiece, a periodical, any item of adornment or aroma—none of the assembly of things, all of them rich, beautiful, and each to its kind, useful, that had formed the taken-for-granted background of Lord Thomas’s life.

Another bell sounded, outdoors, and Thomas stirred. James dipped water from the can into the pitcher and went to him. Hoped that Thomas wouldn’t put him through another session of shock, incredulity, remembrance.

Thomas pulled him down by his arm to sit beside him. “Let me see.” The light was tawny stripes slanting over them both. “Have you slept?”

“Some.”

“You didn’t forget about me,” Thomas asked, “in all this time?”

“Not for a moment.”

“That’s how one talks.”

James said, “It’s so. Have you forgotten me?”

“I’ve worked hard at it. It’s why, I believe, I am still alive.”

This made James want to groan.

“At first I thought of you all the time, it was very bad for my progress … gradually I learned self-discipline.”

“Was I wrong, then, to come find you?”

Thomas looked as if he’d begin weeping again. He made his hands into fists. James took them and pulled the fingers open. Held them.

Thomas looked at him. “You’ve great grey circles under your eyes. You’re an illustration of fatigue. You must sleep more.” He touched James’s face with a gentle but callused thumb.

“I will do my utmost,” James smiled.

Thomas remained solemn. “Now as to your sleep. The floor is no good for you.”

“I’ve slept in worse places.”

“It won’t do. Will you be able to sleep in this sad thin cot, in my arms?”

“Will—they—permit us that?”

“I think they would not have locked us in here together otherwise.” Thomas glanced around the room. “You see, for the last … ah … call it four years … I have had this room to myself. And it is kitted out only for one.”

“Where were you before that?”

“In the barracks. But I was often ill, in and out of the infirmary. And then there was a certain situation which occurred … which made Mr Oglethorpe decide I was better housed away from the others.”

“What situation?”

Now Thomas smiled, so that the sun rose in James’s heart. “I will tell you about it. After you tell me what you have to tell me.”

“Is that how it’s to be?”

Thomas nodded. He was serious again. “I can see that you’d prefer to keep it to yourself.”

James said nothing.

“Did you kill our Miranda?”

“Did I—what?”

“Did you—?”

“ _No!_ ”

“Well then. I had no doubt whatsoever on that score. Anything else you have done, since I saw you last … you need not fear to impart to me.”

“You can say so—”

“James, it _is_ so.”

“I fear to test you. You, whose library is two-thirds sacred.”

Thomas cast a glance at the volumes on the mantlepiece, and there was humor in his eyes when they returned to James’s face. “With me, you must never fear. I couldn’t bear it.” Saying this, even though it was admitting a vulnerability, Thomas seemed somehow to take on heft, as if all his splendor were restored to him, all the assurance that had been his birthright.

James searched his gaze. “And if I should never—?”

“I would assume your reasons, being yours, were all justified. But I should be sorry that you would not let me share what you’ve experienced.”

James didn’t know what to do with this gentleness; resistance rose in him, and with it the twitch of violence, but he pushed it down. “After what’s befallen you, I wonder that you should still have it in you to think so well of anyone’s motives and actions.”

“Would you take that away from me?” Thomas asked.

“I would take nothing away from you. Rather, I would give you things.”

“Your confidence, and your truth?”

James hesitated.

“When you are able,” Thomas added helpfully.

James thought how sure Thomas was that they would have time. He’d been like that before—in the unfolding of their love affair, Thomas had been at once greedy and sublimely assured that there would be time for everything they wanted to do together. He had enjoyed, in fact, teasing James by proposing things, tantalizing him, and then making him wait.

“Meanwhile, you could give me something else—something easy—”

“Yes?”

Thomas leaned close. His breath stirred the hairs of James’s beard. “A kiss, from my beau.”

“I could not restrict myself to one.”

“Begin with one. Then go on as you see fit.”

Their mouths touched, then James drew back.

“What?”

“I am not acting in good faith. You might not care to be kissed by—”

“By whom?”

James turned his face aside. He must tell, but how he hated the obligation.

“I used to be a lord. And you used to be a lieutenant in his majesty’s navy. Neither of us is what we were.”

“Don’t be kind to me. You may regret—” James struggled to his feet. Thomas rose with him, his hands on James’s shoulders.

_Just say it. Just say it._

The rattling at the door thrust them apart. The same guard, with the same long gun. “McGraw, you’re to come and speak to the warden.”

Thomas went to follow, but the guard stopped him with a gesture. “And you’re to wait again, Hamilton.” For the first time there was, in the guard’s tone of voice, something human. “They’ll send him back with supper. I’m given to know you’re to have a roast fowl, as for a special occasion.”

“Ah, yes? Well, thank them, Mr Rivers.”

“And you’re to have another chair, and a second bed.”

“This is a red letter day for me indeed,” Thomas said.

~~~

“Well, and how do you find our establishment?” Oglethorpe began. He sat behind his desk, and the prisoner, whom he’d not invited to sit, stood before it. The guard was positioned outside the door.

“I hardly know as yet.”

“You will see it all the day after tomorrow, before you are put to work. Do not expect, man, any special treatment, despite how you are now situated.”

“I have not enough information to expect anything at all.”

“That’s right. But you will see soon enough how we go on here. Ours is an institution formed on certain lines which I like to describe as enlightened. It’s a place of purpose, but not of punishment. That is, for those inmates who enter into our benign purposes, which are designed for the good of their bodies, and their souls, this is a community of benign aspect.”

“You are very informed on what’s good for the bodies and souls of men.” McGraw didn’t frame it as a question.

“My board of directors and I have taken the best advice, and take it continually.”

“Then I shall see, as I go on, how it answers.”

“Yes, McGraw. You shall see.” Oglethorpe studied him. Devoid of his pirate outfit, he still held himself like one; there was nothing yielding in his stance, though he was clearly performing “biddability”. Could he, the warden wondered, succeed here? Some prisoners, though he did his best to vet those he accepted, just did not; they were too angry, too wild, too depressed. This man, given his history, would never have been allowed to come here except for Thomas Hamilton.

Hamilton was the sort of fellow one found oneself wanting to make exceptions for. He was the sort one could find oneself wishing was one’s son, or one’s brother, or one’s friend. Then, thinking it over, one rankled a bit, because one had to admit that though it was very much a question of his personality that made one feel so, it was also true that had his appearance not been what it was, that had he been scrawny, balding, harelipped, one would not take such notice of him. The combination of fair form and goodness was fatal to the duty to be impartial.

The appearance also, of this James McGraw, had its influence.

“Now, as to you. We are remote here, but not so much so that I haven’t heard of Captain Flint’s exploits, even before it was proposed that you become my charge.” Oglethorpe saw the man flinch—barely—at that word, _charge_. “If half the stories about Flint’s deeds which have appeared in the public prints are true ….”

“I haven’t seen them, but I suppose they are.”

“You brag?”

“I acknowledge. What you already know. I am a pirate, a rebel, an insurrectionist. I have done murder, I have made war.”

“You speak of it coolly.”

“I’m not ashamed.” _Except in the eyes of one man. Who may accept but won’t ever condone._

“I am sorry for that.”

“Are you, sir? I doubt it. But it doesn’t matter. You wish me to be sorry for it, but you’ve no power to affect me on that score, one way or the other.”

The _cheek_ of the fellow!

“You ought to be hanged, a hundred times over, for what you’ve done.”

McGraw nodded agreeably.

“But, as you know, I am not the law. This plantation is not one of His Majesty’s prisons. By accepting you here—”

“You in effect hide me from the law.”

“All of my inmates are here in a state of concealment. For their safety, and for the honor and protection of the good name of their friends and relations.”

“So it was explained to me.”

“This place is set up for the erring sons of gentlemen, not for such as you.”

Another man might have lowered his eyes, but not this McGraw. He looked straight on. _Flint_. “I was a gentleman once.”

“A naval officer.” Oglethorpe tapped the desk with his fingertips. “Before you dishonored your uniform with actions that led to the sad misfortunes of a nobleman who was your superior, whom you were assigned to serve.”

“So it’s for my crime that Thomas is incarcerated.”

Oglethorpe detected the beginnings of insolence, but his curiosity about the man was still uppermost, so he refrained from shutting him down. 

“In the house of the earl, under whose aegis you were tasked to liaise with Thomas in that political matter. You, and … Mrs Hamilton … were a viper in the bosom of the house of Hamilton.”

“Is that what was written down for you, by the earl’s man of business?”

“McGraw, you will not cross-question me.”

McGraw shrugged. “Strange then that Thomas welcomed his viper so warmly just now. And If I’m really that, as well as a fearsome pirate, why did you agree to accept me here at all?”

“Why indeed?” Curiosity. That impulse to favor the ex-lord. A kind of impetuousness that came over him sometimes, and had so little outlet, out here in the middle of nowhere. He couldn’t explain it to himself. “Thomas told me, when he was new here, that his friendship for a Mr McGraw had been the most cherished thing in his life. And though I expressed some astonishment that he could say that of a man who had so betrayed him and his family … he asserted that I was, on that score, grossly misinformed. That whatever of wrong had been done in the matter was his alone, and none of Lady Hamilton’s or yours. He didn’t elaborate, but the expression on his face when he spoke has stayed with me.”

Flint glanced down then, and for one moment there was something almost humble about him.

“I understand then, that you take a leap of faith, in admitting me here.”

“That’s right,” Oglethorpe agreed.

Flint took one little step closer to the desk. Leaned in a little way. His voice was low and reasonable. “You could just let me escape, and take Thomas with me. We would go off quietly, and far, and never be heard of again.”

Oglethorpe gave a start. What _was_ the temerity of the man! “I couldn’t do that! Were it known that the pirate Flint broke out of my custody, kidnapped another inmate—”

“—it would ruin you? But only think: the pirate Flint. That great blackguard, that force of evil nature. After all, what could you and your men do against him, when you’re used to guarding only the docile sons of gentlemen? Who would blame you, really, for his slipping away? Especially if without violence, in the night? Who wouldn’t, in the end, enjoy the story with a shrug?” His green eyes glittered. Oglethorpe was beginning to see wherein the criminal’s power lay. Temptation, persuasion, seemed to curl out of him like leafy tendrils that would seize his own reason and choke it.

Still, he toyed with it. “Say I did. Thomas isn’t like you. How would you take care of him, without resources? Or do you propose to rob us on your way out?”

McGraw actually smiled at that. His teeth were even and very white.

“He wants taking care of, you understand,” Oglethorpe said, his concern for Hamilton warming his words. “He was much hurt before he came to me. Subjected to much injustice which has scarred his body and mind. He’s never, as you have, lived by his wits. I will admit that here he’s one of my most favored fellows—yes, because of what his people pay, but also because of who, and what he is. He is a credit to my methods. He remains patient through illness and difficulty. He’s never been vicious; he sets a good example for the others, and though I take care not to work him too hard, he strives always to do his utmost at every task with a willing mind and open heart.”

“And that’s what you demand of me,” McGraw said. “In order to be allowed to stay by his side.”

“That is what I expect, indeed. Moreover, if you … disturb him … I shall be vexed. Nor will I tolerate it.”

“How will I disturb him, do you think?”

“By destroying his peace of mind.”

“Has he peace of mind?”

 _I like to think so._ Oglethorpe hesitated. “As I indicated earlier … this is an isolated place. I permit no contact between the inmates and any outsiders. No printed news, no letters come to them. My guards are strongly interdicted against speaking with them about anything that goes on outside these gates. I don’t delude myself into believing that this system of shutting the world out is perfect. But I am quite sure that if Hamilton has heard tell of the existence of a Captain Flint, that is all he has, and bears no notion that said Flint is yourself.”

“It would seem so, from what little time I have spent with him as yet.”

“What will you tell him on that score?”

For the first time, the pirate showed a mark of vulnerability. His face went pale. “He will … when I see that he can bear it … know all.”

“How will you see that?”

“I expect … he will show me, some time, that he is.”

“And you are comfortable, withholding this information until that nebulous time?”

“Comfortable? No.” He seemed for a little moment to shrink. But then he was the bold pirate once more. McGraw stepped even closer to the desk, bending over it to speak directly to his face. “Sir, I will be frank with you. I will risk even being foolish. Thomas and I were more than friends. He is my beloved. And I was his.”

“There’s none of that here.”

“You say it, but you don’t believe it,” the pirate said.

This was stunning. So, Oglethorpe realized, it was true. That … implication. Which he had not wanted to consider too closely.

“There is nothing that could induce me from this moment to that of my death, to harm Thomas, or disquiet him, or disappoint him. That the story of what I did when I believed he was dead, will cause him disquiet, will disappoint—I can think of little else. I am fearful. But I won’t lie to him. I will trust him.”

This man was dangerous; he saw ways in which that would be so that he hadn’t anticipated when speaking to Mr Morgan or in reading Mr Silver’s correspondence. He threatened something besides violence, a chaos of ideas. Maybe … maybe he ought to let them go. Maybe he ought to give this man Silver’s payment, and two horses, and open the gate for him at midnight, and then just keep poor Thomas Hamilton in his prayers.

Or maybe, he ought to call in bailiffs from Savannah and give Flint over to be hanged for his numerous murders. Where was conscience? How was it that those deaths didn’t weigh before everything to just condemn him utterly? Why should the man be suffered to live, let alone in proximity—in ungodly intimacy—with one of his best inmates? 

“Remember, McGraw, I and I alone will be the judge of what is harmful or disquieting for Thomas. I will let him try your company, but should it prove the wrong physick—” Even as he spoke the words, a sensation came over him that all his authority was an illusion, that it was a folly to imagine he could affect any behavior from James McGraw that James McGraw did not want to manifest for himself, and that having let this chancre into his establishment, it would require bloody surgery in order to get it out again.

The pirate’s expression changed. His teeth disappeared; his eyes became those of a man open to all good intention. All at once he was acquiescent. “I will endeavor to meet your expectations. Thomas, who is even better than your strong character of him can know, shall be my model. His wellbeing shall be my constant study.”

Oglethorpe gave one nod to the blood-soaked rebel and dismissed him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading. Please leave a comment.
> 
> If you're into Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and/or Angel The Series please explore my other fanfic.


	4. Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein we flash back to James and Thomas in 1705! And Miranda has a nice speaking part. Also certain love negotiations are gone through, and nick-names are exchanged.

1705:

He woke alone, not recognizing where he found himself. Then remembered that, not three hours before, he’d followed Thomas, who’d laughed silently, along the dark corridor from his own bedroom to this unknown guest chamber. They were still naked, barefoot, and he’d been carrying his uniform and boots bundled against his chest with one hand, his other clasped in Thomas’s. Thomas had pulled open the bedclothes, and kissed him so fervently that when he pushed James down upon the bed, he’d been sure it was to initiate another bout he did not think he had the energy to rise to. But then Thomas had whispered, “Good night, good night, good night,” and left him.

He’d felt much too agitated to sleep, but there being no fire, he got under the covers, and absent a candle, he shut his eyes. Now the grey London light sifted in, showing him to be in a bed with blue hangings, in a chamber with blue and green vines on its wallpaper, and hanging over the empty hearth the portrait of a 17th century ancestress, whose hair style made her resemble a cocker spaniel, and whose gaze seemed meant to impress him that overnight he’d crossed a great grave line of sin.

Overnight he’d transformed into a new James McGraw whom he did not yet know.

Yet in the midst of reviewing the onrush of changes of the last twenty-four hours, James’s foremost worry was about Miranda. How, having given himself to her husband, was he to face her? What would he say? What would she expect? His mistress, in whose bed he’d spent four of the last week’s happy nights, only to desert her for ….

Had this … situation … been enacted between Miranda and Thomas before? (The idea came on him suddenly, and made him cringe with distaste. Surely not. Surely not.)

A knock on the chamber door, which opened before he could call out. James expected to see a servant, with a can of hot water. But Miranda sailed into the room, in a frothy but concealing negligee, holding a cup of tea on a saucer and a dressing gown over her arm.

“Ah, I wanted to kiss you awake, but you already are.”

James felt himself flush hot down to the toes.

“I thought you’d be thirsty. It’s like Thomas to put his guests up without so much as a carafe of water or the means to strike a light.” She laid the dressing gown at the foot of the bed. “I thought you might want this as well.”

“Madam.”

She handed the tea. “Oh, am I to be madam again?”

James hid his face in the cup.

Miranda opened the curtains wider, remarking on the dankness of the day, then came to perch at the foot of the bed. Her hair was gathered in a loose braid that hung over her shoulder. James didn’t know how to look at her.

“Your training hasn’t supplied you with the key to the etiquette of your position,” she said.

“Until recently I had little experience among the aristocracy.”

“Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? Our ways are … ours.” She glanced around. He felt how she was giving him time to get back into countenance. “Even so, our ways—Thomas’s and mine—are different still. You will have realized by now, that he’s known all along about you and me.”

“I … came so to understand last night.”

“There’d been no need for him to acknowledge it to you before. Thomas favors discretion. And he dislikes so anything that might caught embarrassment to another person. He would not, for instance, have wanted to give you the impression that either of us should require his permission to conduct our friendship.”

“… yes. I have noticed that about him from the outset.”

“As for … you and him. We had not spoken of it at all, but I could see his passion for you forming. It’s been quite distinct these last few weeks. Though I believed you were as yet oblivious to its nature. I wondered if anything would come of it. Given your … relative statuses. And that Thomas, while easy with his favors, and even his affections … is not someone who willy-nilly gives his heart.”

The words passion and heart resounded in James’ mind and made him need to shut tight his eyes.

“You may think I speak out of turn, but I know what I saw yesterday in our dining room. I know my husband.”

“Madam.”

She laughed. “Now it’s I who am committing the faux-pas of embarrassing a guest under my roof!” She rose. “I will leave you alone. I only hope to impress upon you that the next time we meet, I am to be Miranda again.”

James, knowing that something more was called for, leaned forward, seizing her hand before she could withdraw, and kissing it. Then, this seeming overly formal, he drew her down again to sit beside him.

Two days ago, he’d reveled at this plum career assignment, at his burgeoning friendship with the fascinating Lord Hamilton, and, most of all, at possessing as his first real mistress such a darling as Miranda, who delighted him in everything, not least her pleasure in being loved by such a specimen as himself.

And now it was as if he looked at her through the wrong end of a spy glass. How could she take this so lightly?

Miranda squeezed his fingers. “Oh, those Hamiltons, he is thinking. How they perplex me. How complicated they are. How irresistible! Perhaps: how ridiculous.”

“Not ridiculous.”

“And now, thinks he, what am I to do with the lady, when my poor aching head is filled with nothing but his lordship and the splendors he’s shown me? How am I to navigate this amorous maze?”

“Miranda—” James turned her face towards him, and kissed her, before she could say anything else that would raise his blushes. One kiss gave way to another, and another. “Miranda, perhaps I’m not so prone to share my sentiments as you’d like … but you know that what I feel for you is—”

Her eyebrow rose. “Yes, darling?”

“—is no less full, or intense, than it was yesterday.”

“I didn’t doubt it. But I like to be told.”

He kissed her again.

“You mustn’t catch yourself up in comparisons,” she said when they paused to catch breath. “That will make none of us happy.”

“I would not make you unhappy. Not for one moment.”

“You haven’t. We two have merely added something else to enjoy together. Thomas.”

The things she found to say!

“Right now, I would have you enjoy—” He sent his hand traveling to draw up the hem of her negligee, to seek the turn of her knee. He would lay her back and demonstrate to her, that even after his novel lessons of the night before, she had forfeited none of his interest.

But she drew back, smiling, showing him the gentleness of her gaze.

“As it happens, I’ve heard from my aunt in Tunbridge Wells, who desired I come to her. I’ve decided to do so now.”

Flummoxed, he felt himself pouting. “When do you go?”

“As soon as I am dressed. I will remain a week.”

“A week!”

“You mustn’t think it’s a response to you and Thomas.”

“How can I not?”

“Well, only in the sense that it seems mete you two ought to have a little time on your own to get used to each other. I do need to go to Aunt Kate, she’s a list of errands for me as long as my arm.”

He reached for her again, to lay bare her lap. “All the more should you let me give you something nice to remember in that dull place.”

Putting his hand aside, she got to her feet. “I hope you will write to me.”

“Of course. I—”

“You may say as much or as little in your letters as you see fit. And so will I.”

“Miranda—”

He made to follow her, but she tipped him back with a finger to his shoulder.

“All shall be well, Lieutenant McGraw,” she said, going to the door. “and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Alone again, James pulled the bedclothes up over his shoulders. A few minutes later a servant appeared with the hot water, another cup of tea, and notice that breakfast would be served downstairs in half an hour but punctuality was not expected. If the man knew that James had spent the greater part of the night in bed with his lordship, only to be delivered to this guest room just before dawn, he made absolutely no sign. Not for the first time, James wondered about how servants judged their masters, and spoke of them among themselves.

He was sipping the fresh tea when another knock presaged Thomas’s appearance, resplendent in a red silk dressing gown.

“Well? Have you solved the future of Nassau in every detail?”

“My lord—”

“—Or is more of my—collaboration—required?” Thomas came to bend over him, his smiling mouth hovering close. He took hold of the cup and saucer and laid them aside.

“I was drinking that—”

“Pardon me. I thought you might like something even warmer,” Thomas said, kissing him hungrily as he began to climb in across him. Halfway, he paused, then drew back. “Perhaps I am being precipitate.”

“No, only—”

Thomas restored the teacup to his hand. “I will be patient. Finish your tea.” He withdrew decorously to a chair. “Were you comfortable here?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry to have shifted you so abruptly to this other room. But I wanted you to consider, in full sobriety and with ample leisure, whether you will want to wake up in my bed of a morning.”

“As to that—do …”

“Do many fellows awaken there?” Thomas smiled. “Not just lately, but it doesn’t shock the servants. Their discretion is reliable.” The playfulness gone from his manner, Thomas said, “But James, you are not a _fellow_. And this between us is not … a _dalliance_. In case you are in doubt—”

He sprang up then, and locked the chamber door. Then came back to the bed, gesturing for permission to sit beside him. “You mustn’t think I don’t realize—or that I’ve already assimilated—what a great step it is that you’ve taken. I tried to show you, last night, along with everything else, how moved I was by your … confidence in me.”

“I didn’t know I wanted you until you offered yourself to me.” Saying it plunged James back into the strange pleasing sensation of helplessness of some hours before, when he’d found himself being undressed by Lord Hamilton, praised and caressed, overwhelmed with a pressingly curious appetite for the taste, feel, aroma, of the other man. The feeling faced off in him with another that cried out against transgression, but that soon gave way beneath Thomas’s ministrations. It would, James knew, recur afresh. “But then it was there, full-blown.”

“So I saw,” Thomas murmured. “With such relief. With such gladness. With such satisfaction. And with such … further anticipation. You do realize that … despite my experience in this line … there’s never been anything like this for me either. It is unexpected. It is … marvelous. You, James, are marvelous.”

James heard this with eyes lowered.

Thomas studied him. “I confess all this … and yet you don’t even smile. Do I overwhelm you?”

“The air here’s thin.”

Thomas sat up and away from him. “If this liaison has caused you more regret than pleasure—then it can be our last. We can continue to work together and I will say no more about it, nor trouble you with a single ardent look or innuendo. We will be friends and no more.”

To his own surprise, James let out a grunt of dismay. “Do you really think I would agree to that?”

“You must always tell me what you do and don’t agree with.”

“I do. I … have. Since our association began, I have felt freer and freer to speak.”

“That’s right,” Thomas again radiated affectionate esteem.

“Miranda was in here a little while ago.”

“I know.”

“She told me—” Again James felt himself flush hot, and his throat closed up. Never in all his life had he entertained, much less discussed, this kind of emotion. Never had he dealt with people such as the Hamiltons, let alone at such a pitch of intimacy.

“—that I knew you and she were lovers from the first day that began?”

“Yes. But also … she said something about us. About what she observed between us.”

“She’s the most clear-eyed person I know,” Thomas said. “It’s one of the many things that makes her so valuable to me, as a spouse.”

“She said that she saw what was forming—but she didn’t know, did she, what you were going to do?”

Thomas shook his head. “Until you spoke up against my father like that … it was only what I more and more longed to do. What I rather envied her the doing of.” He illustrated this by pressing a kiss on James’s mouth.

“I hope her abrupt departure from London today doesn’t conceal distress over … over us.” The word burned his tongue with its presumption. That _us_ should ever be James McGraw and Lord Hamilton.

“I don’t believe so. Did she give you that impression?”

“She was rather teasing of me. Teasing, and …” Earnestness gave way to a sudden chuckle.

“What’s funny?”

“I have found a precept.”

“What precept?”

“It’s this: I am not going to tell you things that Miranda says to me. I am not going to tell you what I do with her. She may tell you, indeed I’ll assume she will. And you may tell her anything at all about what we do together. But I will refrain.”

Thomas frowned a moment, then the amiable face returned. “But my dear James, that would be to deprive us of gossip. I scarcely think we can do without that supreme pleasure any more than we can do without—without—” He cast about, “—without strawberry jam.”

“On board ship I have done without strawberry jam from one end of the equator and back again.”

“And isn’t it too bad? That now you may have it—and choose not to?” Thomas held up a staying finger. “I’ll speak no more against your precept. You try it out. I won’t keep score, one way or t’other.”

Taking Thomas’s head in his hands, James kissed his eyes, cheeks, and then, continuously, his mouth, which smiled convulsively beneath his. They grappled; Thomas shrugged out of his wrapper, they shoved the covers out of the way, the cup and saucer slid off the bed and landed unbroken on the thick rug. James slid down to lie beneath Thomas’s outstretched body, letting his arms be pinned, his head tipped back for kisses, liking the weight of the man atop him, wanting more.

So far, their lovemaking hadn’t gone beyond mouths on mouths and hands on bodies.

Last night, having followed him to his bedroom, James had wondered, in a state between excitement and dread, about Lord Hamilton’s repertoire and expectations. He knew full well what men got up to with one another, though he’d never imagined doing any of that himself. All of these acts were shrouded in shame, injuncted in scripture, and invoked in vulgar parlance to humiliate. Yet none of that seemed to have anything to do with them, with Thomas’s desire for him, or his for Thomas, as if together they’d entered some other sphere.

Half fearing and wanting to be ravished in some definitive, boundary-crossing way, James was almost too preoccupied to register Thomas’s methods. Later he was surprised to see how late it was when, after much talking, teasing, and more plain kissing leading to nothing but more kissing than he’d ever thought to experience in his life, Thomas at last relieved him of his aching erection. _Oh God_ , he’d thought, _does he always go about the thing in such a long drawn-out way?_

At one point, Thomas had said, “I didn’t expect to find you so shy of speech.” Then stopped his mouth before he could stammer an answer. At another, he’d whispered into James’s ear, “Don’t worry my dear, I shan’t fuck you without plenty of warning. It won’t be this night.” And then laughed silently, a delicious vibration against James neck, at how this made him seize and groan.

Now James pulled his arms free to wrap them around Thomas.

“My lord …”

Thomas brought his forehead down to James’s. “When we are like this,” he wriggled his bare belly against James’s to show what he meant, “will you call me Tom?”

“Tom. Yes. Tom.”

“And will I call you Jem?”

“No one ever has.”

“Exactly. These will be our secret names. Jem is mine for you. My beau, Jem.”

“Yes, Tom,” James said, feeling that something was racing towards him that when it overtook, would make him fully worthy of this. Willing but unable to put voice to every endearment that gamboled through his mind, he could only say,“I’m yours.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again much much much gratitude to my readers. If you're enjoying this please tell your fandom peeps. I'm new to Black Sails fandom.
> 
> The comment!fairy will bless you with happy Covid-free dreams if you leave a comment.


	5. Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I am a pirate, a rebel, an insurrectionist. I have done murder, I have made war. This was what he had to tell Thomas.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again thanks to Malkingrey for pre-reading and kibitzing.
> 
> Please leave a comment lest I dwindle and fade away like a Victorian maiden whose corset is on too tight.

James followed the guard—not the same one who had come for him, and spoken kindly to Thomas—to the cookhouse, where he was to receive their supper in a basket. Once free of the house, the man, stout, sunburned, squinting, slowed his walk, and stepped in front to block the way. With his gun held across his chest, he looked James over.

“So, I heard you wuz sent fer.”

James said nothing.

“Sent fer partic’kler. Fer his lordship.” He took a step closer. “Well? Answer me.”

“You’ve asked me no question.”

“None o’that, man! You start _that_ , an’ you’ll find—” He prodded the air with the gun. James held himself still against the roaring urge to knock the man down and stove his face in with the butt of his weapon.

“Well?” the guard repeated.

James sighed. “Well, what?”

“Well, what, _sir_.”

James glanced up at the sky.

“I heard you wuz sent for partic’kler for his lordship. For you an’ him to suck each other’s cocks.”

James could feel how it would be to punch the fellow’s crooked leer, and made a determined effort to relax his hands. He swallowed the heavy wet air to keep himself still.

“Seein’ as how … seein’ as how … “ The man was puffing now, his face reddening.

“Seeing as how what?” James said through gritted teeth.

The guard must have spied something in the gleam of James’s eye; he backed off a little, and muttered, “Seein’ as how his lordship gets to live soft. An’ seein’ as how when t’wer an open question who’d get to consort with _his mollyship_ , was more foofaraw ‘mongst the men than–” He spat on the ground.

A half dozen comebacks occurred to him, but, with effort, James kept them to himself.

Last week he had been at the pitch of exaltation and exhaustion, waging a righteous war of vengeance and liberation. He’d been the notorious Captain Flint, the most dreaded man in the Caribbean, known for his brilliance, his fearlessness, his desperation and daring. And now he was … here. And to be notorious for … apparently ….

Seeing that he got no reaction, the guard shrugged and gestured James to walk on. “Get ‘long now, yer wastin’ my time.”

At the door to the cookhouse, the guard shouted to someone inside, then sat on the bench and motioned for James to sit also.

“So, ‘zat true, or ain’t it?”

“That I was sent for? It isn’t.”

“You an’ him was slobberin’ all over each other in t’field this mornin’.”

“He wasn’t expecting to see me.”

“Wuz you expectin’ to see _him_?”

“I was skeptical until that moment. I suspected I’d been subject to a lie well-told. Combined with a fervent wish.”

The guard stared uncomprehendingly, and spat again. “Now don’t pertend you and his mollyship wuzn’t already ‘quainted, because _that’s_ a lie.”

“Indeed.”

“You another _his lordship_? We got plenty on ‘em here, an’ they’re not special, no matter what that Hamilton thinks of hisself or how Oglethorpe treats him.”

“I’m not, no.”

“That mean yes?”

“That means no. I’m a commoner. Like yourself.”

This drew another long suspicious stare. “So if yer weren’t sent for, who put you here?”

“A friend.”

At this, the guard laughed, spitting phlegm, and then the door opened, and the basket was handed out.

~~~

_I am a pirate, a rebel, an insurrectionist. I have done murder, I have made war._ He’d spoken those words, with calm defiance, to Oglethorpe. It occurred to James that before his journey here to Georgia, he might have said, or at least meant, “Flint is a pirate, a rebel, an insurrectionist. Flint has done murder, Flint has made war. Yes, I am Flint, but he is a persona I donned, and I can put him off again. I _will_ put him off again, when the time comes.”

_No. No. No. I became Flint the moment I decided not to go to Thomas’s rescue and succeed or die trying. And no act of my will can undo what my hands have done since._

All this time he’d blamed Miranda for that decision, not to attempt a rescue. Told himself he should not have listened to her. Across the years, it had made him bitter against her.

Only none of it was Miranda’s fault. She’d been the only one of the three of them, back in ’05, to shake off their mutual love stupor enough to recognize the abyss they were bounding towards.

And she’d been the one to endure the most when they fell, in being wrenched out of her society, country, life in the wake of her two precipitate menfolk. Part of what she’d had to endure—and by no means the least part—was knowing that while he and Thomas each loved her, that love did not compare with the transcendent state they existed in together.

For her, James said to himself, even more than for Thomas, he must not make a hash of the rest of his life.

These thoughts came to him as, carrying the fragrant basket, he walked back to the big house with the guard at his heels. His eyes burned with fatigue, he longed for sleep and not to have to think, but his mind was unstoppably hard at it.

The bell rang for the evening meal; the inmates and guards were coming in from the fields and outbuildings. Glancing about through slitted eyes, James instinctively calculated the number of men. After tomorrow he would be among them, doing the same work they did. The plantation was vast and flat, the buildings, except for the main house, seeming to hug the ground like crouching grey beasts, the presence of trees only a perimeter so far off as to suggest a mirage. Over it all the unrelieved sky, with the sun lowering now, making stripes across the ground for every upright thing.

_I am a pirate, a rebel, an insurrectionist. I have done murder, I have made war._ This was what he had to tell Thomas. Would that he could say it in just that way, and feel, as he did in Oglethorpe’s face, his strong sense of justification; the rage that carried him across remorse without letting it touch him. _I did it, my dear one, to redeem your suffering, the death I thought you’d died, I did it in your name to defy those who denied our love, crushed our freedom, who would crush all freedoms but their own._

He used to be able to live on such beliefs, as a fire lives on coals.

He was so tired. He hadn’t allowed himself to know that before. So much of what he’d done, James recognized now, was to flee ahead of that fatigue that stalked him to engulf him. That fatigue wielded specters he didn’t want to confront. Faces lurked in it, the faces of those he’d murdered for his own particular rage.

As he mounted the verandah steps, James wondered what Silver was doing at that moment. Silver was very hard to think about. Since the island, he’d gone obscure. James felt as if he’d been with Miranda, with Hal Gates, with Thomas himself, more extensively and recently than with Silver. His mind wrapped the man, his purposes, in shadows. Trying to remember their last days together, images and words slipped away like those of a dream upon waking.

Only the pain was fixed.

At the foot of the indoors staircase, he paused. He still didn’t know how he was to address Thomas. They were about to be locked in together overnight. The obligation to account for himself, for his presence, took precedence in James’s mind over everything else. He could not let Thomas look at, talk to, touch him again, until he knew what James had made himself into.

“Get on, get on,” the guard grumbled at his back. “I’ve my own supper waitin’.”

As he took each step, James felt himself letting go of the basket, of his balance, falling backwards into space. All at once his joints went wobbly, could barely stay upright or keep his eyes open.

The guard poked him in the spine. “Get going.”

At the top of the stairs he faced down the long corridor that led to Thomas’s room. All the doors were shut, everything was dark except for the faint hint of each brass doorknob in the black.

Again, in his mind, he fell backwards. And again, he took a long breath, and pushed ahead.

~~~

James noticed that in the time he’d been gone, a chair and a crude low bed, identical to those already present, had been brought into the room. He longed to crash into it and pass out.

Thomas relieved him of the basket.

“You had speech with Mr Oglethorpe.”

“Yes.”

“What about?”

“About—a certain person.” James’s jaw was so tight the words felt ground out. What was this he was doing? What was this stupid childish game that was at all events vain and … shameful shameful shameful?

“Me?”

“Not you. Not principally. You were mentioned.”

“Who then?” Thomas lifted the cloth that covered the basket, and for a moment the aroma of roast fowl filled the room like a wicked temptation. But he tucked it down again, reluctantly.

James said, “Ever heard of a Captain Flint?”

Unease took over Thomas’s face. He dropped into a chair. “I understand that it’s for my own good that the world is kept out of our gates.” He shifted in his seat. “Still, I’ve overheard the men talk about pirates. That name is whispered, as being the most dreadful of all of them.”

“Indeed.”

“They maintain that one day he’ll even overthrow the king, and bring everybody—even the Blacks—to the Land of Cockaigne forever.” He shook his head, and for a moment, an incredulous grin flitted over his lips.

“And what else do you know about Captain Flint?”

“There’s nothing else. He’s Robin Hood. King Arthur. Old Scratch. As made-up as them, just a story. A wish.”

_A wish_ , James thought. _A wish._

He dropped to his knees before Thomas and took his hands. “My dear, listen … _.”_

Before he could complete his sentence, Thomas pulled his hands free and laid one on James’s mouth. “Wait a bit.”

He looked intently into his face, while James waited, trembling with apprehension.

Thomas let his hand drop. They each took a deep breath. Thomas said, “You want to tell me a thing. But let me speak first. Will you let me speak first?”

James, his head throbbing, nodded.

“I was recalling—while you were gone just now—how we met. My father gave me the task of putting his problem property, Nassau, to rights, and had the admiralty lend me the assistance of a clever officer. My determination—it wasn’t mine alone, I’d grasped it from finer minds in talk and books—that nothing could be done right about Nassau, about the pirates, without the pardon … made no sense to you.” Thomas fixed his gaze on James’s. “We had much palaver over that idea of pardons, and you were keen to make me see that it was an impossible idea.”

James was still crouched on the floor by Thomas’s knees, but Thomas rose now and pulled him up after. He wandered towards the window, drawing James after. “You took me to see a hanging to demonstrate your points.”

“Yes—”

Thomas gestured him to silence again. “We discussed it a long time. We consulted experts, read law books, talked late nights. I thought so well of my idea, but I could not be _completely_ certain until it was yours also, because I saw that you understood the world in a way that I never would. Had you remained unconvinced, I would have known there was a flaw that couldn’t be overcome. Yet most of all it seemed to me that pardoning those pirates, releasing them from their legend, letting them be men again who might make their way honestly, was the very crux. There’d be nothing without that. And you agreed.”

“Thomas—”

“Listen. Since you arrived here as a bolt from the blue, you’ve seen how I’m reduced, from the man you used to know, weak and ill. And all over you is an anguish, which is terrible for me to witness. Part of it’s your urge to shield and protect me—in the way that you weren’t able to back then. But there’s so much more than that. I fancy I can see the frenzied working of your mind, trying to solve all this in a way that won’t cause me further harm. More harm at least than has come from your sudden appearance here looking as if hell spat you out of itself burnt all over.”

“Thomas—”

“It’s true, I’m diminished. So little is asked of my intellect in this place that some days it slows to a crawl. As I have alluded, I’ve suffered more than once from agues, evil dreams, brain fevers that were … But James, I’m not foolish.”

“I never thought—”

“I can see why you’re so vague. Why you hesitate to kiss me as if you believe I ought to reject you. James, look at me.”

“It’s not in _your_ power to pardon me.”

“That’s right. I’d never presume it. I wouldn’t want it if it was. Neither is it in my power—my right, my wish—to condemn you.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Because I don’t know what you’ve done? I can guess.”

“You cannot.” Rage boiled up—this was manipulative, nearly Jesuitical, had Thomas been like this before? It made James want to strike him. Thomas perceived the crackle of violence, but stood his ground.

“What you’ve done doesn’t matter. Wait—that’s not true. _Of course_ it matters, it matters terribly. Except in this _one_ aspect. The aspect of us. Nothing you’re going to describe will put me off. It’s not going to come between us, or unravel our love.”

James’s look was white-hot fury. Thomas had to force himself to stand still and take it. After a moment James turned to the wall. Pressed his forehead to the plaster. His fists clenched at his sides, and Thomas could see the vein in his temple move beneath the skin.

Thomas said, “Of course, you’re going to tell me every bit of it. Not because I need to know in order to accept you. I stand in no authority vis-à-vis you, in my heart or in this world or the next. I made my judgment about you years ago and it is firm. But because until you tell me, and see the effect it shall have upon me, and upon us, you’ll have no peace.”

Stepping closer, he laid a hand on James’s rigid shoulder. “So tell me. Tell me, Captain Flint, about yourself.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's the Land of Cockaigne? [Interesting you should ask](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/exploring-the-strange-pleasures-of-cockaigne-a-medieval-peasants-dream-world).


	6. Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I did these things for you James said over and over, for us, and for Miranda, because of how they denied us. Your father, that traitor Ashe, the government, the navy, everything whose glory we worked for, that we believed in most, spat on us. Spat on you, trampled you. I did it for your sake. For your honor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should add "slow burn" to the tags here. Yes, we will eventually get to why this story is called The Putative Earl, and yes there will eventually be "Adult Content" Ha. This story has seized it's own reins and gone taking me for a little ride through it's own purposes.
> 
> I hope you continue to enjoy it. Please recommend it, reblog it on Tumblr, leave comments like the angel babies you all are.

The water can was empty. The chicken bones sucked clean, lay in a heap on the trencher at the bottom of the basket. The candle had collapsed into its winding sheet; the last smoke spiraling up just as the outlines of the room, already heat-packed, emerged from the dark.

James had talked all night, sitting close to Thomas at the table, then pacing up and down the room, then standing in the corner with his face to the wall, then back to the table with his head in his hands.

At first he’d been dry, almost detached, as if paraphrasing a written chronicle: in such a month of such a year I went here and did this; because of this circumstance and that, I made decisions A, B, and C. He spoke of Nassau and its political economy as if giving an interview. Described housing and providing for Miranda as though it was a task he’d undertaken as a dispassionate but conscientious agent. Sketched, even rather amusingly, the dramatis personae of the island and its surrounding seas. Described, in curiously detached terms, his invention of Flint, and how he’d leapt in that persona up the pirate hierarchy.

But then into this stream of facts, at first like some trespasser surreptitiously trying windows and doors for a vulnerable spot, then as a full-on invader, emotion broke in. James’s tone changed from one minute to the next: physically he seemed to expand, his skin reddened up, face, previously almost mask-like, sprang to life. The narrative lost coherence, he doubled back, repeated himself, hesitated sometimes for long enough that Thomas dreaded to know what he wasn’t saying. His talk rang the changes of hauteur, desperate reasoning, anger, pleading, chagrin. He evoked deaths and murders, gave reasons and excuses that were strategic, calculating, precipitate, desperate, mad. Much of what he told assumed a context Thomas could never have, or an impossible ability to read minds. The longer he went on, the less of a grasp either of them had upon the order of events, on any kind of lucidity.

All the while he told his story he wouldn’t look at Thomas, and Thomas found he couldn’t look at James either, though he wanted to very much. He’d imagined, so innocent was he still, that James would tell him all this while lying in his arms! It was all Thomas could do—and it was because he’d resolved to do it lest he begin to scream and never stop—not to ask questions, not to express his dismay censure pity at what this man he so loved had become.

_I did these things for you_ James said over and over, _for us, and for Miranda, because of how they denied us. Your father, that traitor Ashe, the government, the navy, everything whose glory we worked for, that we believed in most, spat on us. Spat on you_ , _trampled you. I did it for your sake. For your honor._

As the hours grew smaller, James’s voice lost its force and volume, the coherence of his phrases deteriorated. At last, encouraged by Thomas, he’d lain down—collapsed—on the bed. Once horizontal, he’d quickly fallen into a stupor. And in that stupor, he’d gone on vocalizing, muttering, arguing, haranguing and pleading with interlocutors visible only to himself. His eyes stopped tracking the movement of Thomas’s hand above his face, he didn’t hear Thomas say his name. James’s skin was hot, drawn, dry. The fever shook him like a sere leaf on an autumn branch.

Thomas had knocked up a guard; called for water, and for the doctor to be sent for.

Now he slumped in a chair waiting, his elbows on his knees. Pondering how he could still be so naïve, as to imagine that he’d be able to hear James’s account, and all at once assimilate it with an all-encompassing love, as if he possessed the infinite compassion and acceptance of Jesus himself.

On the bed, James, locked in fever, stretched, groaned, started to get up, fell back. His features were distorted with pain; he might have been ill for days instead of hours, so wracked was he already.

Thomas realized he himself was cold, almost shivering, though the room still trapped all the still warmth of the brutal Georgia summer, barely cooler at dawn than at any other time. His hands felt like blocks of ice. Focusing on them, little by little he knew he was angry at James. Not for being sick. But for coming here and telling him all this, and shattering forever the soothing story Thomas had made up about him, about Miranda. His hands shook with the fury he’d long ago denied himself any outlet for _._ Yet how could he be angry at what he’d heard? _ANGRY AT HIM?_ _I have no right,_ Thomas thought. _I am mad. I am mad, after all. Yes. It is the kind where one thinks one is God._

His head ached. He pressed his temples, doubled over in the chair. _I can’t do this. It’s too much. I could do it alone. But I can’t do this._

_Oh little did my mother think, the day she cradled me, the lands I was to travel in, the death I was to dee …_ The song started up, clear and sweet, rambling through his mind, as if some female nearby was singing, someone just outside the door or window. He thought that if he got up and looked, he’d see who it was. He could ask her to sing more softly, tell her there was a very sick man in this room. It sounded so much like Hobbs. Oh, Hobbs, he hadn’t thought of her in so long, a red-cheeked young woman who seemed to know every song ever made, who delighted in romping with him. She’d taken care of him when he was little, not his governess but a cousin of one of the tweenie housemaids, told off to be his playmate. Until the day she’d been kicked by his father’s horse. He remembered it, though he couldn’t have been more than four, how the horse, seemingly for no reason, reared up and trampled her, and Papa astride it laid about with the whip, shouting “Drat her, drat her” as the hooves crashed down over and over on Hobbs’s body as she screamed. The groom had snatched him up, covered his eyes with his big manure-stinking hand and bundled him away.

But … but Hobbs hadn’t sung that song. That wasn’t her kind of song at all. It wasn’t a song they sang to children, it was a song one overheard when the peasants didn’t know anyone from the family was in earshot. It was about … it had something to do with Hamiltons, didn’t it? He couldn’t think what. And it was about death. The rest of the ballad hid itself from him; he could feel that there were verses and verses and they somehow crouched out of sight and mocked his inability to locate them. Drat her, drat her.

James had assassinated his father. Miranda had plotted it out for him, and he had gone to sea and done it. Of all the things Thomas had just heard that made his heart twist in his breast, that one alone lay inert as a stone. That one alone said, _Yes. Yes, good._

_Could I be God if I don’t know the every verse of the song? If I don’t know every verse of_ every _song?_ This was reassuring. He was still just a person, a perplexed person whose mind was under assault. He would go to the window in a moment and ask that woman not to sing there anymore, or at least to change her song. In a moment, when this dizziness passed off …

In London one night early in their affair—it was after the first time James had fucked him, an act that began with such tentativeness that Thomas feared he might, in the end, demur, and finished with an exuberance that was gallopingly possessive, even aggressive, leaving them both knowing that some final layer of diffidence that James had clung to was gone, that James had spoken to him about his promotion from midshipman to lieutenant. It was the result of an initiative he’d taken in battle, an act ambitious and impulsive that could have easily gone wrong and harmed others . And it had gone wrong, but he’d managed to get out of it with no hurt to anyone but himself, and in such a way that his commander, Hennessey, praised his ingenuity even as he chided his recklessness. When Thomas had asked him what conclusion he’d drawn from the experience, whether in favor of more riskmongering or more restraint, James had said that he still pondered that often, and could only conclude that to hold either as the fast rule must be the mistake that hardened one’s mind prematurely. One must deploy experience yet remain mentally supple in each new instance. What Thomas remembered most was not James’s answer, but how the question troubled him, interrupting his post-coital euphoria as if he’d been stood up suddenly, naked, to be quizzed by a panel of admirals.

Thomas had quickly turned the chat back towards the lascivious. He was always trying to get James’s story out of him, treasuring any glimpse of the man’s past that James, who was so guarded, would afford him. Unlike so many, he did not indulge in boasting, either about his naval career or his sexual conquests. At first he’d been sure that James must have gone with men before; how, Thomas imagined, could one grow up in the navy and know nothing of that vice, even if only as an unwelcome imposition? Yet during their first night together, had Thomas not known that James had been up to the cods with Miranda for weeks already, he could have imagined he handled a complete virgin. For all his forthright manliness James often displayed a particular delicacy, a vanishingness. Pleasure startled him. Kisses and praise made him shy; moreover, he was very serious about lovemaking, had at first taken Thomas’s playfulness, his inventiveness, as an affront.

From a few things he said Thomas gathered that James could never forget that the Hamiltons were aristocrats, and in his mind that made them some unique tribe with inscrutable ways, requiring exploration, observation, and taking nothing for granted.

He hesitated to compare notes with Miranda, but his curiosity was so strong after two or three nights with James. What did she think on the matter? Miranda had given him her slow, hot, side-eyed smile when he brought up the subject. “There have been encounters with women—not many at all—he went to sea very young. None of them were ladies. I am also his first mistress. He has many notions out of books of how a gentleman keeps a mistress. How he pleases her. Sometimes I can imagine I am a lady of the court of Queen Elizabeth with my swain.” A different kind of woman than Miranda was might have used this as an opportunity to laugh, however indulgently, at her lover, or at least make a gently mocking joke with her worldly husband, but her tone had nothing of that. “As for his experience of men … it has not come under discussion between us. We have so much else to discuss.”

At that moment the lock rattled and men entered the room, two guards, a servant with water, the doctor, and with a dressing gown over his nightshirt, in carpet slippers and bed cap, Mr Oglethorpe. Who, seeing that the patient was not Thomas himself, hastily disappeared.

The doctor, Mr Schumacher, who knew him and his maladies well, gave Thomas a dry look and went to inspect the patient. Thomas’s confidence in Schumacher was only so high—he liked leeches, emetics, cupping and other standard forms of medicinal torture, but had the virtue of not being over-insistent in his treatments. He was a rather lazy fellow, and over the years Thomas had gathered that his interventions with less privileged patients than himself were often less thorough.

“Amazing he’s stood it off this long,” was his pronouncement on James’s collapse. Oglethorpe had, clearly, filled him in on James’s journey and activities. Thomas knew better than to ask Schumacher pointless questions: would James regain consciousness, and when? Give water or withhold it? Nothing in these cases was ever precise; you watched and waited; he’d watched and waited over himself time after time.

Schumacher opened a vein in James’s arm, bleeding him into a small bowl he’d taken from his bag. Thomas’s gaze fixed on the blood, oozing in thick droplets from the paler inside of James’s forearm to drop into the bowl. He saw himself seizing it and crashing it into the wall; he saw himself drinking it down. He could fold himself into a ball right now and give up, he knew he could, if he let his mind stay on that for just an instant longer. The veil that separated his self from full-on madness had gone gossamer overnight.

Schumacher put a hand on his shoulder. “Steady there, man. Here.” From his pocket he slipped a flat flask, and pulled out the cork. The rich aroma of brandy reached him as the doctor brought it up to his face. “Keep it. I’ll tell Mr O it’s by my orders. But don’t give any to McGraw. You drink it all.”

Other than weak cider, no spirits were provided to the plantation’s prisoners. Thomas could tell just from the smell of it that a mouthful of this would stagger him. He recorked and slipped the bottle into his pocket.

With his arm hanging outstretched for the bleeding, James had stopped tossing; his breathing was very loud, lids drooped over sightless eyes. Schumacher held him by the wrist, until, having deemed the blood-letting sufficient for the moment, he bandaged the arm and gave the bowl to the servant to empty.

Mr Oglethorpe, now dressed for the day, reappeared at the door, where Schumacher joined him, discussing the case in tones too soft for Thomas to hear. He was still stood in the middle of the room, staring half mindlessly at James, fingering the shape of the brandy flask in his pocket, a throbbing going on in his head that somehow contained the song that girl was still singing, though she should’ve stopped by now, and James’s voice telling telling telling. The anger coursing through him was supposed to be for all of _them_ : who had opposed them, exiled them, stripped them of their ranks and identities.Thomas knew that. So why did he want to shake James, pound him until he admitted that he’d done everything wrong?

Standing over him, Thomas formed the words silently on his lips. _I was stupidly naïve. I repudiate you James McGraw. You were worse than the rest of them. I reject the malice and spite you exerted on my behalf._

Schumacher and Oglethorpe approached him again. The warden gazed on Thomas with the same slightly abstracted worried look he gave to all his inmates who were ill or lazy or otherwise not acting up to his great ideal of the Reforming Institution he’d invented. It wasn’t an intimidating expression, it seemed to ponder more how to help than how to punish. Pulling his long lacy handkerchief from his sleeve, Oglethorpe dipped it in the water can and began to blot the sweat from James’s face. 

“There not a bit left in the ice house,” he said, shaking his head mournfully, “or I’d have some brought. Look you, Cuddy,” he addressed the teenaged indentured servant who come in with the others, at the same time producing a long folded paper fan from the same sleeve, “unless Hamilton sends you for anything, you sit by and fan him. Don’t shirk.”

He turned to Thomas.“You nurse him, Hamilton, you ought to know how by now. You heard me tell Cuddy to wait on you—you send him for whatever you need. Forget about your usual duties for now.”

Thomas nodded, and dragged his gaze up to meet the doctor’s. “If he wants to live,” Schumacher said, “he probably will.” He’d pronounced the same over all of Thomas’s fevers; it seemed to be his one piece of philosophy. 

This time, when they were left alone, the lock was not turned.

_Oh little did my mother think, the day she cradled me, the lands I was to travel in, the death I was to dee …_ Thomas flung himself at the window, shouting. “Leave off that nonsense! Leave off, I tell you!”

There was no one there. But the song went on. He circled the room, checking the windows on each side, kneeling to peer up the chimney. _Mad._

When he returned to James, he was motionless, hot, his lips ajar with the breath puffing uneasily in and out. Thomas bent over him. After a few moments he noticed how his own tears plopped darkly on James’s undyed shirt, and how it was racked up uncomfortably around his torso. The boy Cuddy was fanning, but staring off in the opposite direction as if by this performance and nonobservation, he could pretend not to be present.

James’s hand moved and caught Thomas’s.

“In my thoughts,” Thomas whispered, “I betray you. I betray you in my thoughts, because they’re not really mine. Not mine, you know. They’re just _there_."

James squeezed his fingers, and he knew he was asleep.

~~~


	7. Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’ve been sent for?” Thomas said.
> 
> Before Thomas could object further, he was hustled out between the guard and the manservant, who seemed astonished to find himself in such close proximity to an inmate, and didn’t conceal his silent opinion that Thomas stank. But instead of being brought directly down to Oglethorpe’s wing, Thomas was hastened out across the yard to the bathhouse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short chapter after an unexpected hiatus. My friend Malkingrey, who was the beta on this fic, passed away, unbeknownst to me, when I was completing the previous chapter. Needless to say, there's been a hitch in my momentum.
> 
> This entire fic is now dedicated to her.

James passed a bad, restless night; Thomas did not sleep at all, his mind whirling with James’s confessions, and his fear that having made them and passed into unconsciousness, he might pass away altogether, leaving Thomas with his confidence shaken, questions unanswered. Peace of mind exploded.

There were things he’d heard that he wished he didn’t have to know. Things that, despite his promise before James began speaking, were so putrid as to threaten to overwhelm his love. Or if not his love, his own willingness to refuse to be judge and condemner, to reject any possibility of rejection.

And then there was that person, John Silver, about whom Thomas needed to hear much much more. Who, once having been invoked, stood up ten feet tall between them and inhabited this very room as a real and lively giant.

Schumacher returned in the morning an hour after the bell had rung for the first work shift. But with him was Mr Markson, the guard in charge of Thomas’s work gang, along with one of Mr Oglethorpe’s liveried servants, and a woman in a plain dark dress and expansive apron—Thomas hadn’t seen any females except through bars since he’d been here—who immediately went up to the bedside and began tugging at the clothes.

“What are you doing—!” Thomas tried to fend her off. Schumacher intervened. “This is Mrs Lang, I employ her to nurse. She’s here because you’ve been sent for by Mr Oglethorpe. As for what she’s doing, she’d preparing to wash the patient. Don’t worry, she knows what she’s about.”

“I’ve been sent for?”

“You’re to hurry,” Markson said, laying a hand on Thomas’s arm. “You’ll see why.”

“Nothing will happen to your friend while you’re gone,” Schumacher said. “Nothing more, at any event.”

Before Thomas could object further, he was hustled out between Markson and the manservant, who seemed astonished to find himself in such close proximity to an inmate, and didn’t conceal his silent opinion that Thomas stank. But instead of being brought directly down to Oglethorpe’s wing, Thomas was hastened out across the yard to the bathhouse. 

“Mr Oglethorpe’s orders,” Markson said.

Instead of having to prepare his own, Thomas found a hot bath had been made ready for him; he was attended, skittishly, by the man in livery, who, having laid aside his coat, and still holding his nose aloft as an organ suffering most grievous offense, scrubbed his back and hair and fingernails, handed towels, and tried to assist Thomas in putting on a set of clothes he’d never seen before, that were not the prisoners’ standard garb, but seemingly random items from the wardrobes of three or four men, none of whom was as long in the shanks or wide in the shoulders as Thomas. 

“Come on, come on,” the servant chanted, as he arranged these garments on Thomas, tugging and fussing, “I can’t bring you in to those folks looking like this.”

“What folks?”

“Can’t you hold yourself any better? You used to be a lord.”

“Don’t scold at him,” Mr Markson said. “Quiet now.” To Thomas, he said, “You’ll see in a minute. Put these boots on.” There was commiseration in his tone, but Thomas could see that he wouldn’t be explaining this.

Just as he hadn’t seen a woman since going inside, neither had Thomas worn any but flimsy canvas shoes in Georgia. The boots, which has probably been confiscated from some more recently arrived inmate, had been hastily polished. To his relief, they were long enough in the foot, though not wide enough at the top, and thus squashed around his ankles. They were heavy and confining as shackles and made him break into an immediate sweat. If, he wondered, he were just to make a break for it and run back to James, would Markson stop him? How would he stop him?

Now they were leading him back to the big house, mounting the verandah and heading towards Oglethorpe’s offices. At a signal from Markson, they stopped. The manservant looked Thomas over, shaking his head probably unconsciously, in reprobation. Pulling a handkerchief from his own sleeve, he dabbed at Thomas’s sweaty cheeks. “You were supposed to shave.” To Markson, he said, “He was supposed to shave. I told them, in the bathhouse, to prepare a razor—”

“Well, they forgot. And we’re here now. What difference does it make?”

“Clean-shaven, Mr Oglethorpe said.”

“We can retrace our steps.”

Markson and the manservant engaged in a swift intense battle of gazes, before the fellow shrugged. “I don’t care.”

Thomas wondered why they were lingering here. Was someone going to come out to them? The clothes were much too heavy; the coat pulled at his neck and shoulders, and he felt he’d been dressed up as the Guy, lacking only the smearing of coal on his cheeks. Neither Markson nor the manservant would meet his eye. 

What were they doing to James, Schumacher and that Lang woman? A suspicion overtook him that he’d been pulled away in order that they could do something Thomas would never permit—cut him open, poison him with some evil medicine, or—what if they were taking him away somewhere? What if Thomas was never going to see him again? 

He was on the verge of pushing past Markson and making for his room, when there came a tap on the inside of the window from an unseen hand. 

The servant led the way inside, Markson following Thomas to the same room where he had his meetings with the warden. After the glare of outdoors, he could barely make out anything, but that the guest chairs ranged in front of the big desk were filled. There were three, no four strangers in the room with the warden, whose heads turned as he entered.

One of them leapt up and moved quickly towards him, coming right up to his face, staring, before snatching off his hat and making a very low and correct bow. “My Lord! My cousin! The Earl of Ashbourne. I have found you.”


	8. Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Someone else for Thomas Hamilton?
> 
> Oglethorpe was very bothered by the news, and didn’t conceal his impatience when the servant who brought it handed him the visitor’s card. 
> 
> On the front, engraved: The Earl of Ashbourne. This title crossed out in pencil, and beneath it written, Hon. Alistair Hamilton.  
> On the back, also hand written: Upon urgent business pertaining to my cousin Thomas Hamilton.
> 
> ____________________________________________________________
> 
> In which the significance of the story's title is revealed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter revised 12/25/20. A few changes for clarity against what comes later.

“Someone _else_ for Thomas Hamilton? What, is this place become the stock exchange, or the coffee house, where gentlemen come at some agreed-upon time to look out their associates?” Oglethorpe was very bothered, and didn’t conceal his impatience when the servant handed him the visitor’s card.

On the front, engraved: _The Earl of Ashbourne_. This title crossed out in pencil, and beneath it written, _Hon. Alistair Hamilton._

On the back, also hand written: _Upon urgent business pertaining to my cousin Thomas Hamilton._

Barely three days had elapsed since the arrival of James McGraw. This must be some feint of his, gotten up with compatriots, to effect an escape or even an overthrow. What else could it be? The coincidence was stark. And he’d never heard of any Honorable Alistair Hamilton. Since the death at sea of Thomas’s father, Alfred, the earl in whose name a firm of London solicitors remitted fees for Thomas’s keep, was the second son, Edward.

It was early in the morning; his wife was waiting in the next room for their breakfast. He was inclined to send the visitors away unanswered. Pondering, looking first at the front, then at the back of the heavy pasteboard card, he at last summoned the deputy head of the turnkeys. Mr Budd had been with him a long time, they were from the same town back in England, they each had the same attitude to their institution’s success.

Mr Budd, a man who spoke seldom either with his lips or his eyes, scrutinized the card with his even stare. Then he went out to take a surreptitious look at the visitors.

He recognized their carriage at once: it was not a hired one, it belonged, as did the matched horses, to one of Savannah’s leading families. The postilion who stood by the open carriage door wore their livery. The passengers were invisible inside.

Going back to his senior, Mr Budd said, “If they’ve stolen that equipage and all to play a humbug, it’s the rummest thing I’ve ever heard on.”

“You believe his lordship the earl is in that carriage?”

“I don’t disbelieve it.”

“I could send to Lord Farrier and inquire.”

“And leave them sitting there for hours while you wait for a reply? You’ll look a fool if you’re wrong.”

The two men eyed each other. The skin beneath his wig crawled but Mr Oglethorpe saw no other option.

“I suppose we’d better have them in then.”

“You could go out to them,” Budd said. “Easier to dismiss them if you don’t like what you see.”

Oglethorpe hesitated. What if it was _not_ a hoax, and he failed in showing every courtesy and deference to the earl and his retinue? Yet how odd it was, that at this raw hour of the morning, with no advance correspondence or shipping intelligence from Savannah, Lord Ashbourne should present himself requesting an interview? Yet there was no question that should the earl visit Savannah, he would be the guest of the Farriers.

“We’d better waste no more time,” he decided. “Bring them in, with all cordiality.”

When the visitors—there were three—were shone in, it wasn’t immediately apparent which of them was the purveyor of the card. A man upwards of fifty, perspiring very much in a black woolen suit, heavy stock, wig, and air of great beleaguered authority, and with him as apparent subsidiaries, two younger men also sweating through wools of different colors, and whose eyes darted about to take in the setting without appearing to look about them. The day was more than usually sultry, overcast, and absolutely still.

Before Mr Oglethorpe could make a mistake in addressing who seemed the senior member of the party, one of the young men put himself forward. He was brown-eyed, fresh-faced, in the middle twenties, though the way he carried himself he seemed more junior than he was. His clothes were of a cut that must have been the most _au fait_ in London, obviously brand new and well-fitting, though he seemed himself not to fit them in turn. He wore no wig beneath his hat, and his light brown hair was tied back in a queue.

“Sir, I’m desirous at once of seeing my cousin Hamilton.”

Mr Oglethorpe overcame his stagger by recourse to the formalities, inviting the visitors to sit, ringing for refreshments. He learned at least that the older man was a Mr Stephen Lammton, Esquire, the younger his clerk from Lammton and Leigh. These were familiar names, the powerful firm of solicitors beneath whose letterhead all the Earl of Ashford’s business was transacted. They were all newly arrived from London.

The young man sat, then at once popped out of his chair. “Sir, will you produce him?

“Will I _produce_ him?”

“I should like to see him, just as he is, at this moment. It’s why we’ve come so early.”

Mr Oglethorpe, ponderously, sat behind his desk. “Sir—”

“I was advised otherwise by Mr Lammton, but I preferred to present myself without warning so that no preparations should be made and I should see for myself truly how my cousin is keeping.”

“Am I indeed addressing his lordship, the earl of Ashbourne?”

The young man frowned. His frustration made him look more like a freshman under hard questions than like a man possessed of noble rights. “Did you not read the card sir?”

Oglethorpe again glanced at it. At the name printed, and the name written in. “The, ah, honorable Mr Hamilton, then?”

Mr Lammton, the senior solicitor, who was applying a large linen handkerchief to his soaked upper lip, spoke suddenly. “It’s his lordship’s idea. That he is not in fact his lordship at all. Despite all being legally snug, himself as next in line for the title since the death of Edward, the fifth earl of Ashbourne.”

The young man rolled his head at this. “Legally snug is nothing. There’s what is true, and what isn’t. Will you now send for my cousin without delay?”

“My lord,” Mr Oglethorpe decided to stick with the higher form of address, “This is highly irregular. We must have some speech first. I must, first of all, see some—” He coughed, “some bona-fides.”

“That I am who I say I am?” the young man gestured at his companion. “Certainly, Mr Lammle has all that in his document box. I am Alistair Hamilton; the late Alfred, the fourth earl of Ashbourne, was my uncle, my father being his younger brother Frederick. Thomas and Edward—the late Edward now—are my first cousins.”

Mr Lammton interrupted, dryly. “Master Edward, unfortunately, broke his back on the hunting field in February. He was unmarried and without issue, and as such, the title now passes to the next male heir, Alistair.”

“Yes—“ Alistair took up. “Since then I have undertaken to gain a thorough understanding of my inheritance and my duties, both of which were most unexpected. I’ve gone painstakingly into all my financial and legal affairs, which were rather more convoluted than they had ought to be. Thus I’ve discovered that though my cousin Thomas is declared dead, he is alive. And being kept, at some expense and great secrecy, here. Not that it’s the expense that I object to, it seems moderate enough.”

“Ah?” Oglethorpe cocked his head, and exchanged a look with Mr Budd.

“I must _insist_ , upon my perquisites as the putative earl, that my cousin Thomas be produced at once. After all, I’m his … jailer, am I not? I pay the … the … annual fee, that is, I am for now in charge of the estate which pays it. So upon my soul—”

Mr Lammle raised a judicious hand, “My lord—”

The young man heaved a sigh, and his tone changed. “You would think, would you not, that I’d be delighted to find myself, all of a sudden, promoted to a higher sphere? Title and property? I’d never seen my cousins since I was ten years old, I barely knew them. I took holy orders, and, like my father, began to make a career in the Church. I was content enough to do so, but when circumstances changed, I saw it was my duty to let it go. However, having discovered that, my cousin being still alive, I am in fact no earl, and that my uncle Albert did a most wicked, pernicious thing to his own son—”

“The fourth earl,” the solicitor intoned, “took a moral action he thought meet and proper, at the prompting of Providence, for the good of his family, his sovereign, and his country.”

“No doubt he thought so. No doubt my cousin Edward thought so too. And no doubt had you succeeded at concealing it all from me, it would go on just as my uncle arranged. However, I know about it now, and I cannot step in to the rightful property of another living man.” Alistair clasped his hands. “I am engaged to be married, to, to, the most worthy, best, most adorable, and in addition upright, even pious—in short, my bride to be is in entire agreement with me that the subject of my cousin Thomas must be entirely ameliorated before we can think of being wed.”

From the look that Mr Lammton exchanged then with his clerk behind the young man’s back, Mr Oglethorpe could guess much of what wasn’t being said. That despite all efforts to blandly baffle the new heir of the peerage whose affairs and secrets the firm of Lammle & Leigh had handled with utmost discretion for a century, matters had been looked into, untangled, and questioned. The sly old fourth earl, in a righteous rage, had killed his first son on paper without compunction and hurled him into outer darkness. Within a couple of years, he met his untimely end at sea. His second son, unprepared to inherit so soon, uncurious about the ins-and-outs of his estates, perhaps even a feckless type, though good men as well as rakes broke their backs hunting, had carried on his father’s arrangements. Then came this punctilious Hamilton cousin and his fiancée, new brooms that wanted to get into every corner. Yes, Mr Oglethorpe could imagine it. For himself, he even admired it. He respected responsibility and attention to obligation.

The certainty that this was a hoax generated by James McGraw and his associates had by now faded. Mr Lammton producing certain papers attesting to identities and the succession of the short-lived fifth earl to that of the sixth earl, Mr Oglethorpe and Mr Budd looked them over with little pretense of disbelief.

It was a problem of some magnitude. Never before had an inmate’s family rescinded any man’s status, let alone its chief representative showing up in person like this, demanding proof of life. It threatened the mighty pillar of trust and privacy upon which the institution operated.

“Is it a question—” Oglethorpe felt his way, tentative but feeling duty-bound to ask, “pardon me for an indelicacy—but is it a question of your young lady wishing _not_ to be led to the altar without first securing her future as a countess?”

The young man flushed at this, and looked, for the first time, affronted. “On the contrary. It is a question of us both wishing to have all things right.”

“And has she—much discussed, do you think, among her friends and family, the prospect of the return of an heir thought dead, to take up his titles and rights?”

“If you mean have I permitted any rumor to begin back home that my cousin Thomas is still alive—that there is gossip afoot on the matter, the answer is no. No one knows it, except those of us here.”

“Well, and your affianced lady. And perhaps your hosts here in Savannah, Lord and Lady Farrier?”

At this the solicitor flourished his large handkerchief. “Your concern, sir, is understandable, but if you knew his lordship, and the people to whom you refer, you would not wonder. As for the Farriers, they know only that, as the connection between the families is already established, it would be odd indeed for them not to open their house to his lordship while he is in Savannah looking into his property interests here.”

“Very good, very good. An excellent gentleman, of course, Lord Farrier. And is it your idea, my lord, that is, Mr Hamilton, that your cousin, leaving here, will return to England and take up all his duties as the next earl? The … among other things … management of the lands, the, ah, seat in the house of lords—"

The young man thrust himself forward again, his face shining with fresh sweat and earnestness. “Do you wish to quiz me further sir,” Alistair said, “or will you at last send for my cousin?”

Thomas was sent for, and the visitors provided with tea while they waited. Having seen the doctor briefly, Oglethorpe knew that McGraw was laid low under a fever. The thought, like an intrusive splinter through a sock, followed: what was he to do with the man now? If young Hamilton took Thomas away, as seemed likely, he’d be stuck with having to keep that ferocious pirate incarcerated without his tempering influence. Never would he allow himself to wish, let alone pray, for such a thing, but should the fever take McGraw, as it took so many men in this unforgiving climate, much ado could be avoided.

~~~

James opened his eyes. The room was flooded with illumination. It entered and cleared him, buoyed him up. The pressure on his skull, the rack of pain that was his bones, was all suffused and done away with by soft light. 

He could see himself, far below, stretched out on the bed. The sheets were drawn back, he was naked, and a woman was working over him with a moist cloth she dipped in and out of a basin. _She is laying out my body_. _There, so I_ am _dead._ Thomas wasn’t present, but James felt that was right, he shouldn’t see him yet, not until he was clean and shrouded. It was peaceful, watching the washing of himself; the woman went slowly, humming, and seemed to take pity on each limb, each scar. She set the basin down, pulled the sheet across to cover his sex, and put a hand to the small of her back, stretching and craning her neck to and fro. He saw her face then as she gazed up at the ceiling, but she didn’t see him. When she’d had her stretch out, she brought the cloth up again, dabbing at each cheek. James thought he ought to be sorry that this had happened, or disappointed, or frightened. But there was just a kind of pleasant flush, a sensation of reassurance, of being on the other side of everything.

“Feels better, don’t it?” she said. “Bit cooler?”

The boy Cuddy came into the room then.

“You pick up that fan. It’ll do him good now.”

The boy fanned his body. The woman tossed the dirty water from the basin out the window. James began to understand that they somehow thought he was still alive.

Now he could feel the breeze the boy generated against the left side of his face and neck, how it stirred his beard hairs. The vast sense of wellbeing receded, and he chased it inwardly, but it was going like the tide, leaving him exposed and vulnerable.

“The inmate they keep in this room—that tall one they took out just now,” said the boy. “It’s because his family’s come for him. Can you feature it? All the way from England.”

The woman’s head whipped round. “What’s that?”

“It’s what I heard downstairs. They came to take a look at him. Maybe they’re going to take him out of here—take him back home.”

“Take him _home_?” The woman stared. “Boy, you’re mistaken. No one here gets to go home.”

James’s eyes opened and this time he was no longer looking down at himself. The blissful illumination was gone.

“I heard—hey.” The boy gestured with the fan. “Mrs Lang, look—”

~~~

“My Lord! My cousin! The Earl of Ashbourne. I have found you.”

The skin of his back and neck rose up in panic as Thomas jerked around, terrified he'd see the corrugated fist of his father’s face stood behind him.

Then he remembered: his father was dead. James had hunted and killed him.

James had hunted and killed him.

Thomas’s stomach squirmed. The gentleman who had bowed gently took his hand, and was still speaking, in a coaxing tone.

“My cousin. I see I’ve alarmed you. I’m Alistair. Do you remember me at all? I was a child when we last met. It was at Ashbourne Manor that I used to see you, when you were down from your college. I am Uncle Frederick and Aunt Honoria’s little boy. Once you indulged me with a game of bowls on a hot day when all the adults were being so cross.”

Thomas looked at the young man, who seemed completely unfamiliar. His eyes traveled past the other strangers in the room, and fixed on Mr Oglethorpe. “May I return to my room now? I don’t like to leave James.”

“In a little while, Thomas. This gentleman has come a long way to meet you.”

“It’s a very inconvenient time,” Thomas said.

“How changed he is,” the young man whispered, as if speaking only to himself. “Albeit it’s been more than twenty years, but he was such a fair, fine—even as a child I could see Thomas was …”

“He doesn’t understand,” one of the strangers broke in, aloud as if addressing a small gathering. “Sir, I regret to inform you of the demise of your brother Edward. This is your cousin Alistair Hamilton. Ali-STARE. HAM-ilton. He _is_ the sixth Earl of Ashbourne.” The gentleman asserted this as if he expected someone to contradict him.

Indeed, the young man gave an angry head shake. He still held Thomas’s hand, and pressed it now with his other. “I’ve learned that a great wrong’s been done to you by my uncle. I’ve come to put things right. It’s you who are the earl. You were deprived of your rightful life, of your potential.”

Thomas, withdrawing his hand softly, said, “I can’t linger here. I’m going back to my room. Please let me go.” He turned, to find Markson, his hands folded around his firearm, blocking the doorway.

Markson gave him a look, and eyed Mr Oglethorpe. Thomas’s knees jiggled. He put up a hand, and rather to his surprise, Markson stood aside for him.

He was walking out when he heard the guard murmur, under his breath, “You poor bloody sod.”

Thomas began to run, though everything, the ill-fitting clothes, the hard boots, the choking heat, his own torpor, was against it. Clattering along the verandah, cutting back indoors on the other side of the house, he barely noted the stares of those he passed; he was shouted at, but no one intercepted him. He took the sweeping staircase two steps at a time, gasping before he reached the top, and flung himself towards his room, already convinced he’d find it empty as it ever was. James would be gone, James had never been here. All he had now was the terrible infliction of intelligence about the pirate Flint, and that narrow pallet, the narrow future.

~~~

As he galumphed towards it, his door at the end of the gallery opened, emitting a wedge of gray light into the dimness. A figure wrapped in a sheet half staggered out of it, and sank down the doorjamb to land on the floor, bare legs outstretched.

Thomas dropped to his knees beside him. James’s arms lifted with aching slowness, and Thomas went into them. He felt that the fever had left James, and his heart fluttered with gratitude.

James murmured, “I hear you’re leaving this place.”

“No.” Thomas pressed his face into James’s neck. He was, miraculously, cool and clean; he smelled of lavender.

“That your condemnation is now reversed.”

“No.”

James repeated, wonderingly, “No?”

Thomas cuddled closer. They rested together against the doorjamb, feeling each other breathe, suffused with relief, thanking Providence.

A sound made James glance up. Halfway down the gallery, stood a young man, very smartly dressed, very good looking, with something of Thomas about the set of the mouth and chin, regarding them with a questioning, mild mien and slowly turning his three-pointed hat in his hands. He’d cleared his throat.

“I see,” he began. “I see, Cousin Thomas, why my arrival today is an inconvenience. I will … I will call upon you again. Tomorrow. And hope to cause no more distress.” The young man’s eyes met James’s. His expression remained open, observant. “And you sir, I hope you’re quite well?”

James regarded him for a moment, tightening his arms around Thomas’s shoulders. “Mending, my lord. Mending.”

The young man bowed then, replaced his hat on his head, and retreated. James felt Thomas’s lips form a kiss at the base of his jaw, and hold it there.

~~~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please feed the writer: leave a comment!


	9. Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thomas was, in the before-time, an accomplished, various, leading kisser.
> 
> January 25: 2021. I've revised this chapter, adding an entire new scene.

_1705:_

“You sail in a week.”

“Yesterday you reminded me that I sailed in eight days.” James smiled into the pillow. Thomas was lying on top of him, agreeably half smothering him.

“My fretting bores you, but I cannot help that.” He kissed James’s neck. “Having only just discovered you, I hate that my explorations should be cut off so soon.”

“Explore me again.” James wriggled, and Thomas shifted so he could roll onto his back. He felt so greedy, for how Thomas looked at him, with such lustful admiring tenderness, and for all the other fruits of his attention. The entire category of these experiences was one he’d never anticipated for his life, even to hope for. His focus, his perceived desires, had lain elsewhere; the sensations roused by Miranda and Thomas, urgent and irrefutable, had not even existed before in fantasy. He’d tried to explain this to Thomas, but for once, articulation had failed him. Instead he conveyed it in all his caresses and responses, in all the bits of conversation about everything else that passed so easily between them.

“Don’t say cut off. Say … suspended. For a time that’ll seem brief in retrospect.”

“In _retrospect_ ,” Thomas said, in a tone of ironic skepticism. “Where is this retrospect located, and what is the handiest short-cut to reach it?”

“While I’m away, you and Miranda will speak to each other about me.”

“And whom will you speak to about us? About me?”

James gave him a look. “My lord, no one. No one at all.”

_1715:_

James had finished with his fever, but the burst of energy that had seen him to the door of the room that morning collapsed within the hour into a punishing indolence. Under Mrs Lang’s eye, he and Thomas napped on their separate pallets through the rest of the day, meek as nursery children. That night, after a last look-in from Schumacher, Mrs Lang was withdrawn and they were left alone. James came into Thomas’s bed, but the hesitant talk they began lapsed quickly into shattered slumber.

They woke simultaneously, at dawn. Facing each other on the same thin pillow, confronting one another’s eyes, examining one another in silence. James, who usually dreamt vividly, was blank. The period of his illness seemed, from this other side of it, to have been long, long, leaving him, not improved, or cleansed, but as someone a little different and far removed in time even from the day of his arrival at the plantation. Nassau felt like another life, though he knew he would never be able to lay down the sense of responsibility for it, not ever, not for a moment. He still awaited Thomas’s verdict upon him, still much doubted what it would be.

Thomas brought a hand up from under the blanket to cup James’s face. His thumb passed gently back and forth across the corner of his mouth, smoothing the moustache, lingering on the lower lip.

James sought, in the serene color of Thomas’s pupils, for what reflection of himself was there. Knowing that he wanted for his moral separateness from this most worthy man to be justly, even cruelly, upheld, but also, at the same time, excused. Wanted Thomas to put him far far down, and to lift him up beside him forever. Recognizing that what Thomas must want, in the midst of his own moral quandary, was their complete equality, a return to the union of their minds they’d had before. Thomas would struggle with his knowledge of Flint’s deeds, but he would never give in to the struggle. He was too good—or was it too selfish?—to give James up.

Taking Thomas’s hand, he pressed his lips to the fingers, to the palm, then tasted each digit. They were warm in his mouth. He bit at them softly. Thomas sighed, and shifted, and James, flooded with nostalgia, terror, desire, moved on top of him, letting himself be heavy, trembling as Thomas passed his other arm across his back. They took up kissing where they’d left off, quickly going deep, their bodies rubbing together. Then, seized by urgency, James slid away, pushed the blanket off, needing to see. In the grey early light Thomas’s body appeared much as he remembered it. The belly and thighs untouched by the sunlight still alabaster, his cock standing up from the nest of fair hair made a familiar alluring silhouette. Glancing at him, James saw Thomas observe his own erection as if it was something unfamiliar, unexpected.

Thomas’s eyes were wide with what, in other context, would’ve signed fear. Then they shut tight, and he nodded, words bubbling from his stammering lips _pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease…._

The impulse to be slow and worshipful was overcome by another; James wrapped a hand around the prick and moved to cover it with his mouth. Thomas groaned, his body rippling, hips lifting up. Intense relief rose up in James, some sacred gratitude that he lived to repeat this act on his beloved. Thomas was already moaning and sobbing, nearly flailing, so that James lifted his head to check on him.

“Too much?”

“Yes. No. Yes.” Thomas reached for him, tugging him by the beard. Smiling, James came up to face him, to kiss him again. Thomas was, in the before-time, an accomplished, various, leading kisser; he’d taught James that the act was not merely a preliminary to others but a cherished thing in itself. Now his manner reminded James, searingly, of Miranda as he’d last left her, when every one of theirs had been packed with her attempt to reassure herself, to pry him, just a little more, open … when she’d been so unhappy and afraid, and he hadn’t helped her.

Thomas panted like a tired swimmer. James rolled over and pulled him on top. Brought Thomas’s hand down to their groins, where he needed no further guidance to seize both their cocks in his squirming fist. This made the bed judder. Grappled together, they rubbed and shuddered, too overcome to form themselves into anything more elegant, let alone purposeful. With a sort of whine like a dog’s, Thomas came with a loosening cry that he immediately suppressed, pushing his mouth wetly against James’s neck. Thrusting up against Thomas’s belly, James grunted and spattered. Thomas was still deeply trembling as they collapsed into stillness, Thomas’s hand still trapped between their bodies. Against his neck, James could feel Thomas smile. In his ear, barely audible: “Jem. My own beau.”

“Tom.” They shifted about so as to be able to look at each other.

Thomas’s smile was the softest thing in the universe. It shone on James, and quickly faded. “You are too stern, you always were, but I’d see you now look more—”

“More what, my lord?”

“More like that,” Thomas said, as the smile he sought opened on James’s lips. He kissed them, and for a few minutes they poured the kisses back and forth like wine between two goblets. When he could speak again, Thomas said, “You are here. You are here. You are here.”

They neither of them went above a whisper.

“Yes.”

“Yes, _Tom_.”

“Tom.” James found himself laughing, laughing into Thomas’s beard, his breastbone. The need for silence become a game.

More kissing. Hovering above them was the pressure of the morning bell that would, surely, bring someone to the door to interrupt this; even more threatening, the blade of all they still had to speak of together.

“When your hair has grown long again.”

“Yes?”

“I shall play with it as I used to,” Thomas said, as if there was nothing whatever more important. “How long will that take, d’you think, Jem?”

“I don’t know.”

“We will see,” Thomas said. “We _will_ see _._ ”

James wanted to ask where they would be at that time. But as if by mutual treaty, they didn’t speak about Alistair Hamilton and the events of the day, though that person and his mission made a presence between them as real and more immediate than the other unseen figures who populated their thoughts. 

Thomas stroked his head, which was beginning to be stubbly. “We will see,” he repeated. “In the meantime—”

“Yes, my lord?”

Thomas looked hard at him, saying much, and they fell again to kissing.

~~~

When he next brought in their meal, James noticed an object under the table, a wooden panel leaning against the wall. When he’d picked it up, he saw it was a cabinet painting.

The family group, intimate and rightful. The comfortable domestic interior, orderly, attractive. Looking it over, James sank into a chair. Traced the lines of the composition, noted the children’s’ toys, the shimmer on the lady’s satin. He’d never seen pictures like this before meeting the Hamiltons. Miranda had taken him to see an exhibition—he’d forgotten that until now, it was their first outing together, without Thomas. He’d been bemused at first at the attention she paid to the paintings, and what she seemed to see in them. She’d offhandedly—it had seemed offhanded at the time though later he recognized that she’d been educating him quite purposely—pointed out this and that in which the pleasure of looking lay. This and that in which the meaning dwelt.

How had this come into Thomas’s possession? Was it meant for some moral object lesson, a reminder of what it was Thomas had deviated from, to earn his life-long incarceration? An object of luxury to recall all those he’d once lived among and would see no more? A subtle cruelty, if so.

“Were I to look at it too often, I’d get lost inside it. That’s why I keep it set aside.”

Thomas had risen from bed and silently crossed the room to stand behind him.

“A very fine object to find in a prisoner’s cell,” James said.

“It is a loan from Mr Oglethorpe. He noticed how I looked at it, in his chamber. How I was drawn to it.”

“Yes?”

“I wanted this to be … I pretended …”

James took it in. The picture was suddenly something else than what he’d first taken it for. The Dutch matron in her fine clothes of a century ago. Her husband with his reddish pointed beard. The children with their toys.

“I hoped for you both that there would be …” Thomas stopped. Gasped.

The painted panel in his hands was like an indictment.

He’d barely thought of it since. Had never told it to a single person. He knew better than to speak of it to Thomas, who was already heartbroken.

How to confess that the child, born in their second year at Nassau, had no name, was buried beneath a tiny stone marked Baby Barlow, with the dates, in a grave he’d never even gone to look at? Miranda had hidden the pregnancy itself behind his absences, self-absorption, and her tightly laced stays, and even when it was so obvious that he’d noticed it at last, and tried to make much of her to show pleasure and anticipation he knew he ought to feel, she’d kept her face turned away and wouldn’t let him touch her belly. He went over it now, as if it was a scene that had happened to someone else, how he’d come back from that voyage with a good prize, had books and silks to bestow on her, as well as a coral for the infant, and had listened as he came up to the house door for the cry of their child who must have been, by his guess, at least a month old. How he’d walked in and seen her, sitting at the table, with a volume open in front of her, her hands idle on either side. How slowly she’d risen, how quiet she’d been in greeting him as if he’d been away only briefly instead of for weeks. She’d said nothing. He’d waited, waited a whole night and day before, unable to grasp what she was about in her silence, until the words burst forth: “And your babe, where is it?”

James saw that Thomas was crying. His face was absolutely still but the tears were thick in his eyes. “I always believed I could have whatever I wanted. That no one would ever challenge me, for didn’t my good intentions shine forth from everything I said and did? Even my father—especially my father. Why didn’t I take some silly girl who—but no, I had to have an equal, a _friend_ to wife.” He yanked at his beard. “Then ignored all the good counsel that my equal, my friend, strove so hard to give me.”

The feeling that the next moment the very air could ignite.

Thomas squeezed his eyes shut. “These bitter truths about myself—”

“I’ve brought it all back,” James said. Oglethorpe had warned him that his influence would be malign. “But you mustn’t be bitter against yourself. You are not to blame—”

  
“No? Not for my arrogance? What else was it brought us down?”

“Not when the arrogance of those who act not for love but for power, for wealth, goes unpunished—nay, unremarked. I hate to see you condemn yourself ahead of them.”

Thomas took the picture. Looked at it for a long silent moment. Then carried it to the door of the room, where, hesitantly, he tried the latch. It was not locked. He opened it, just enough to thrust the picture out, and shut it again. He stood with his forehead resting against the door jamb.

James said, “Come and eat something.”

Thomas took three long deep breaths before he raised his head. His expression had reformed itself, had become neutral. He approached the table, and sat down.

James murmured, “We will talk about Miranda. We will talk about her every day if you choose. We will not consign her name to silence.”


	10. Ten

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Who is the man? He must have a name.”
> 
> “He’s called James.”
> 
> “And has my cousin’s attachment to this James been one of long-standing? Does it span all his years here?”
> 
> _______________  
> Chapter edited & some changes made Jan 25 2021

Alistair Hamilton, having passed a pensive, sleepless, prayerful night, went to see Mr Oglethorpe again in the morning without his lawyerly entourage. 

He was received by the older man, who had also had some hours to compose his ideas, with equanimity. He had resigned himself to what was likely to happen, and was more curious about how it would play out than anything. They faced one another across the desk, at first, in silence. Mr Oglethorpe allowed himself to wonder what the young man’s line of attack would be without feeling particularly anxious about it.

At last, Alistair spoke. “Who, sir, is that man who shares my cousin’s room?” Overnight, couldn’t flush from his mind’s eye the sight of Thomas Hamilton rushing towards that nearly naked figure, and how they’d come together so needfully, and collapsed into a sort of apotheosis. Or so, the more he pictured what he’d seen, the more it had seemed. Like a holy picture glimpsed in the side chapel of some Venetian church as one moved past the dado.

“Who he is, is not important. The important thing, the certain thing, is that if you take your cousin away from here, you take that man as well. You take both, or neither.”

“I take both,” Alistair repeated. He felt as if he’d known this already.

“Or leave both. I’m not going to advocate for your choice one way or the other. However I emphasize that, either way, your lordship, you must do nothing that will publicize this plantation, or your visit here, or anything about it.”

“So I’ve been advised, repeatedly by Mr Lammle, my solicitor.”

“He can _advise_ ,” Mr Oglethorpe said, “but I must warn. Be aware that there are those, in England, who can _act_ , in such a way that any attempt to expose this plantation or its subscribers and supporters, will not only not be believed or taken up, but will be suppressed in ways that will surely leave you wishing you had left the matter alone forever.” He said this in a mild tone, knowing that he need not, on his own account, appear to be threatening, or even biased.

The young man tucked in his chin and hunched his shoulders for a long moment, but when he spoke he again appeared unintimidated. “I’ve understood that, from the outset. I mean, it has been impressed upon me. Moreover, my private feelings about my late uncle Alfred being what they are, I see how unavailing it would be to advertise them.”

“So what has been your idea then, of how your cousin Thomas is be brought back to England and restored to his earldom?” Mr Oglethorpe allowed himself to smile at this. “Shipwreck? Amnesia? Some comedy of mistaken identities?”

“Something adapted from the bard, d’you mean?” Alistair said, straightening up. “I understood your point, sir, yesterday. I realize now I was precipitate in imagining that my cousin can be restored to his old rank and way of life. Also, having seen him … having followed him out of this room and seen … I have grasped that he … ” The young man shrugged helplessly. “whether my notion is correct or not, that he’s far, probably, from desiring any such thing.”

Oglethorpe waited.

“Who is the man? He must have a name.”

“He’s called James.”

“And has my cousin’s attachment to this James been one of long-standing? Does it span all his years here?”

“Your cousin’s _attachment_ to James began in London. They were separated when your uncle sent his son away. Their reunion took place here less than a fortnight ago. I accepted James as an inmate, upon his being brought here by certain people who did so for that purpose, on the particular point that he was to be reunited with Thomas. And so I reiterate, that should you choose to remove Thomas from my custody, you take James as well.”

“James is yours to release? What about the wishes of _his_ incarcerators?”

“Under the circumstances, they won’t care.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Thomas and James will tell you more, if they so wish. It’s not for me to gossip about.”

“To gossip about?” the young man said. He sat forward in his chair, then gradually, sat back, frowning. “Is he the fellow—the friend—who broke my cousin’s sanity by betraying him with my cousin’s wife? The one responsible for my uncle’s consigning Thomas to Bedlam?”

Mr Oglethorpe sat still.

Alistair spoke hesitantly. “That was … the gossip. Indeed, that was the account of it, which I saw written down in my uncle’s papers. But there were other things written down, in other papers, which Mr Lammle did not want to let me see, but which he produced when I insisted on full disclosure.”

Mr Oglethorpe threaded his fingers together across his waistcoat. He watched the young man, but kept his expression neutral.

Alistair went on frowning for some time, then, to Oglethorpe’s surprise, his expression changed. “The last thing I wished to do is to replicate my uncle’s moral judgments of my cousin Thomas. On finding out that he’s alive, all I wanted was to do him justice.” He shook his head. “But my notions of how that would go were … fantastical. I see that now.” He shook his head again, and looked miserable. “How soon can they, my cousin and … James … be readied to depart from this place?”

“There is nothing to keep them here. But consider, my lord, where and how will you receive them? Recalling that there must be nothing that will generate talk or call attention to this place. Do you propose to bring them back with you to England?”

“I had assumed I would return my cousin to England. Now I realize that he—they—must be allowed to make their own plans and do as they prefer.” His prior expression of determination returned. “I’ll begin by speaking to my cousin, if he will agree. Will you present him my greetings, and ask him to see me?”

~~~

Thomas didn’t grasp what the knocking sound meant until James, slipping out of his arms and into his own bed, called out, “Come!”

No once, since he’d been in Georgia, had ever asked Thomas’s leave to open his door.

The guard Markson peered in, but didn’t cross the threshold, except to set the food basket down inside. “Breakfast. McGraw, you’re to stay here all day, ah, recuperating. And you, my lord—”

“There’s no ‘my lord’ here, Mr Markson,” Thomas said. “Pray stop it.”

“You, my lord, are to dress and prepare yourself. The gentleman from England is here again and wants to see you. I’m to say, if you will receive him, your lordship. Cuddy is coming along with the hot water.”

“Did Mr Oglethorpe tell you to call me that? In fact I’m sure he didn’t. You mustn’t.”

“No, my lord. That is, yes my lord.”

“Mr Markson, it’s not necessary.”

The boy Cuddy entered the room, contrary to his way, practically on tiptoe. Having set down the water, he proceeded to unpack the basket onto the table, first laying a cloth, then rattling down pewter plates and spoons. Having set out a repast that was very obviously more like what Mr and Mrs Oglethorpe enjoyed each morning than what came from the inmate’s cookhouse, Cuddy turned towards Thomas and bowed awkwardly. “May it please your lordship.”

James saw Thomas cringe, or rather his attempt to be seen to conceal his cringe. He was blushing all up his neck and cheeks, which could not be hidden.

James said, “Leave us. Thank you. Go.”

When they were alone, Thomas slid down in the bed and pulled the blanket up over his head. James went to him, but paused, feeling the pulses of anguish that the concealed form gave off.

James laid a hand on the covered shoulder. “My dear.”

Thomas’s stiffened under the touch. After a long moment, he whispered, “I will not be separated from you. I will not be separated from you. I will not be separated from you.” Then, “But leave me be. Please.”

James lifted his hand. Thomas stayed hidden. At the table, James filled a plate with food, and brought it back to the bedside, setting it on the floor, then returned to the table and seated himself with his back turned. His belly was roaring, and the repast sent up for “his lordship” was superior to anything he’d eaten in weeks.

While he’d satisfied his first hunger, James was aware of the needle-prick all up and down his back of ignoring Thomas, of waiting for him to move, yearning for him.

A feeling of disconnection stole over him. He shut his eyes. Surely this wasn’t real. When he looked again he would see the slick jungle, he would see Silver, his body would be seized again in that unshakeable grip of physical crisis. One could hallucinate an entire other life, or so he’d read, when the reality before one was unbearable. Little by little he felt himself vibrating, shaking almost, from the wrists, the ankles, the shoulders. It wasn’t like the fever of the other day, it was as if his body was stealing away from him, taking what was real along with it, leaving him alone and undefended with this absurd dream. If this plantation was real, he’d be out hoeing that field he’d seen when he arrived, his back aching, covered in sweat and red dust. And that would be all. That would be the rest of his life.

Until the other day, Silver was the biggest thing in his life, his life of vengeance, of reaction and action, of straining and striving. Then, with some slight of hand, some mind trick that James had still not had time to comprehend, Silver had halted it, had cleared the board and changed it all. He’d made decisions that weren’t his to make, for people who had not asked for them.

Now he was here with Thomas, and no wonder he couldn’t stayed fixed on the realness of that, of this place, no wonder it kept shimmering and shifting, was sickness and nonsense, the rules stated then revoked, the dice shaken and thrown and then snatched up before they could be read.

The food in James’s stomach moved as if it reassemble itself; he clutched at his belly, repressed the urge to heave. A swell of hatred rose up from his center: hatred looking for a fix, moving quick as thought among the dramatis personae of his life, the dead and the living, those far away, and those here. He already hated himself, didn’t he, didn’t he? And Thomas, did he hate Thomas, for not being safely dead?

No.

No. No. No.

Behind him, Thomas threw off the cover and sat up, the bed creaking beneath him, to take up his own plate. James listened to the soft sounds of Thomas eating, the occasional clatter of the metal spoon against the pewter. Little by little he felt himself realigning, the terrifying static feeling dissolving, the clench of foul emotion giving way. He took long deep breaths, readying himself to speak, to speak sensible. “There’s more here when you’re ready.” He remembered that he was waiting for Thomas to signal when it was all right to look at him again, and kept his back turned.

A moment passed before Thomas said, “This is enough.” Then, as if he was talking to himself, “What I should like is to walk in our woods. To go as far as the spinney, and then came back across the fields, counting the stiles as we go over them. Naming the fields, there was Pease field, Lady field, Cowslip field, and so on to Home field. That was a good walk in all seasons, or so I thought, and Hobbs did too. Hobbs hadn’t her letters but she could count up to six, which was the number of stiles. She let me think I’d taught her to count so high.”

“Hobbs?”

“Oh, we were great friends. This was before I went away to school, you know.” Thomas was out of bed now, and brought his empty plate to the table. Smiling in a manner almost frivolous, and with his hair sticking up every which way, he was so pretty that James wanted to seize him again for kisses, yet he also gave off a tinge of madness, more pronounced than those he’d shown James already.

Seating himself, looking at him as if they sat together thus all the time, Thomas said, “Would you go there with me?”

James swallowed. He wasn’t sure if Thomas knew where he was, or to whom he was talking. But he didn’t dare ask. “To these woods?”

“And to the orchard, where we had the best pippins, which I would gather before I went to the stables—and we’d give an apple to each of the horses. I’d show you how, seeing me, they would all turn their heads so expectantly, because they knew I never forgot to bring them something. And I’d show you my Fotheringay, and let you ride her too. Would you go there with me?”

“I’d go into a pit of cobras with you.”

“And the library. It was a famous library, in my grandfather’s time. He let me have it to myself, and to read what I liked, but only because he didn’t care about it for his own. I wish I could show it to you. There was …” He trailed off. Something happened to his face; a kind of decay rose up out of it, an expression that made James gasp.

Thomas stared into space.

James put a hand on his shoulder. For a moment he might have been grasping something wooden with a shirt draped over it; a surge of fear took him, he squeezed harder, and then Thomas moved a little, giving him a querying look. He was himself again. Turning his neck, he kissed James’s hand, even as it slid away.

Thomas said, “I am getting an old fool. I was going to tempt you as well with a particular fishing spot, and the peaches on the south wall, and my excellent dog, my dog, who …. But these are long gone. They were already long gone when you and I met—when I married Miranda, even, gone, gone. Mrs Little, and Fotheringay, Hobbs and Blackie. The pippins and peaches may be no more either, for all I know.”

“You want, then, to return to Ashbourne House?” James spoke the words as if they’d burn him. “Your cousin will return you to it.”

“I was a child there.” Thomas broke off a piece of bread and rolled it into pills between his fingertips. “A happy child. So I always believed.” He mused. “D’you know, my dear, I thought I’d taught myself, here in Savannah, how to rule my memory, but in fact one is already well used to how some things shine out perpetually, while others stay always in the shadows. Ashbourne, when I let my mind return to it, is all bright places and deep shadows to me. It always was, and what the shadows conceal, they conceal so utterly! It was a wonderful place for a little boy, when … that is, during those times which … My brother, you know, was born when I was six. And then my mother .... It was all different after that. I never really lived there again after I was sent to school, at seven. I have always felt my child self was a different person.” He focused on James. “My cousin who came here yesterday—who holds the title now—believes he’s a grave injustice to put right.”

“So I gathered.”

Thomas stared, and was again abstracted. “He remembers _me_ , from his own boyhood.”

“What does he remember?”

“I have no idea. Something at any rate that makes me real to him.” He pronounced this as if it was quite mysterious.

“Do you remember him at all?”

“My little cousin. Just a boy when I was what I thought was a man grown.” Thomas chuckled. In a drawing room tone, he said, “If you thought me insufferable when we met in ’05, you would have detested me in ’95.”

James showed him his half-smile. “You must have been even more absurdly comely and charming.”

Thomas shut his eyes, and seemed to travel, but it only lasted a few seconds. “Had I but had an older sister with a keen eye and righteous wit, I’d have been half the youth I was, and twice as good for it.” Thomas made a grimace. “Perhaps I’d even have had the sense to … well. By the time I had benefit of Miranda’s eye and wit, they was too late to save us.”

They were both silent then, evoking Miranda, but she would not come.

“It’s a point of honesty with my cousin, about who is next in the line of succession.” Thomas formed the little bread pills into one mass. 

They looked at each other, across the remains of the breakfast, in the light of morning coming through the open window. _I can’t believe I am here. This is Thomas. I have been given him back, I have kissed and touched and lain with him and now here we sit talking about what some cousin of his is going to decide. I am going to let these other decide for me, strange and bitter as that is._ He thought of Silver, would Silver be angry, were he to find out how quickly his plan for exiling Captain Flint was being undone? _How many times_ , James thought, _am I to be reminded that all my rages and schemes are as nothing to … Providence? Fate?_ A cork bobbing in the waters.

“Having ferreted out my father’s action, against all the considerable obfuscation his man of law could put up, this little Alistair wishes to be scrupulous. He wishes to be fine. He wants to bring me back to life.”

The phrase resonated, and made them both wince as if barraged by a high sandy wind.

The sense was growing in him that Thomas’s evocation of Ashbourne House was not random, not passing. There was something in his talk that was a signal, a request that Thomas himself might to be conscious of. James felt he had to try again. “Is it a return to Ashbourne you need? For a day, or a month, or a year or more?”

“I can’t be the earl.”

“No, but you needn’t go there in that guise. There are so many other guises.”

“I’m tired. I’d live quiet, anonymous, if I could.” Thomas looked at him. “I’m afraid you would chafe in that kind of life, wherever it’s set.”

“I’m tired too.”

“But you won’t always be.”

James whispered. “And you will?” Thomas’s eyes were averted, his lips set in an ugly line. He nodded. “I will never again be anything of a public man.” He paused. “I’m not sure I’ll ever again be much an active man. A well man.”

“And you think I will leave you in a few months and go off roistering again? You overestimate me. That spring’s unwound.”

Thomas wouldn’t look at him. “So you say now, but I know you.” There were tears of missing in his voice, as if James wasn’t right there beside him. “It’s such a dirty world. Grasping and indecent. We were so fixed upon improving it.”

“Yes.”

“It wants putting in order, it always will, but I cannot think of that anymore, though I once knew it for my born duty. It shames me to feel so.”

“There’s no shame in resting ourselves. There’s no shame in waiting to see.” He put his mouth to Thomas’s cheek. “My dear, I know you too.”

Thomas turned and pulled him strongly into his chest. They held tight to each other.

“Answer my question,” James murmured. “Is that what you want?”

“What I want?”

“I would go live in your sweet childhood memories if we could. That being impossible, I would even … though I am its enemy … go with you to England, to Ashbourne, if that’s your wish.”

“That would be very dangerous for you.” As Thomas said it, James saw a little flame of longing light in his eyes. He could accept it, that Thomas should want to go home, though he didn’t understand or really sympathize. Thomas didn’t really believe it it was in the irretrievable past. He might need to see for himself that there was nothing there for him anymore. To bid it a final goodbye. Or perhaps, James told himself, he was wrong. He must get used now to allowing that he could be wrong, and Thomas right. His love told him always, like a heart beating, that Thomas, and what Thomas wanted, was, for him, right, right, right.

“There are ways of lying low, even in places like that.” James mused. “Perhaps even most in places like that. Your cousin will abet us.”

Thomas said, “You would hate it.”

“I hate the Empire. But I’m home wherever you are. We can be a couple of poor relations your noble cousin keeps in some isolated cottage. Mr Darby and Mr Joan. We’ll make a kitchen garden.”

Thomas opened his eyes. “A kitchen garden?”

“And have flowers too. It can be done. There are books on the subject, we will get them up.”

He tried even as he said it, to reject this memory that came up, of the garden Miranda painstakingly made and kept at Nassau, to feed herself out of, and him too when he was there. How, when he was there, which was never very long, he’d dig in it at her direction, feeling he was indulging her, expecting praise. She gave the praise, and then she took what affection, what pleasure, she could get out of him, which he knew was never enough, but for a long while she didn’t complain. She never even pointed out that he enjoyed doing the garden and that it was a strange sham gotten up between them that he only did it to please her. He hadn’t let himself like it too much, just as he hadn’t let himself give Miranda too much, because it would’ve meant putting off his coat of rage. She’d known that. But it had taken a long time for her to despair, and begin to rebel. James rebuked himself, rebuked the memory. Miranda, squinting at him from beneath her gardening hat, with a trickle of sweat running down her neck, whom he ought to have seized in his arms, licking up her sweat, kissing her neck, making her laugh, retreated from his thoughts.

Thomas murmured, “It couldn’t be possible.”

“If we could make it possible?”

In James’s arms, Thomas shuddered. James took that for his answer. “We shall see what can be arranged. Let’s ready ourselves, he’ll be here soon.”

They washed, and having donned their inmates’ clothing, made themselves neat. Thomas combed his wet hair back with his fingers; James straightened the bedclothes and put the remains of the breakfast into the basket.

There was a rap on the door. Thomas froze.

“Can you speak to him?”

“Haven’t I been speaking?”

“I mean—”

“You mean, do I wish to stand by and let _you_ arrange it all, you and him, while I drift through sunlit memory halls? _Yes_. But I will speak to him.”

  
~~~

Alistair had, within a few hours of parting from her at the beginning of his journey to America, written twice a day to his fiancée, Betsy. He didn’t send the letters, which would only spend months on the ocean at the risk of falling into the wrong hands, but kept them in an interior pocket of his coat. Much more frequently he consulted the miniature in its gold snap case, the little portrait seeming each time he surveyed it to have an expression suited to his own state of the righteousness of his mission, and also his ever-unspooling doubts. The miniature, like most miniatures, had an exquisiteness of color and heightened prettiness that overdid its justice to the sitter, who in actuality never looked like a nice young lady being prettily painted, but whose mien, seriousness, humor, tenderness for him, were still somehow concealed there for his eyes, and invisible to anybody else’s. Anyone who saw the little painting would notice that the young lady had a drab complexion, and brown hair, plain-dressed, that her mouth should have been less wide, but that the artist was quite good at eyes, which after all were the most important thing. Betsy’s actual eyes were not limpid and vacuous, as in the picture, but when he looked at it, Alistair was able to see them in his mind as they really were, intent and intelligent and full of a judgment of him that he yearned constantly to see as favorable.

While he waited for his meeting with his cousin, Alistair took out his pocketbook and, borrowing ink and quill from Mr Oglethorpe, added to his letter in progress. During the voyage across, it had recorded all the details of the shipboard scene, and reiterated daily Alistair’s intention to rescue his cousin and restore his noble status; the barriers and difficulties he’d envisioned then being, as he’d since learned, entirely beside the point, and replaced with others he couldn’t, on the water, have foreseen.

_There is a man, who shares my cousin’s accommodations in a state of close companionship. He is—you will scarcely credit it!—the same as the one whom my uncle Alfred caused to be exiled forever when he committed Thomas to Bedlam. I was going to write, that I cannot tell if he is a gentleman or not, (as I mentioned earlier, the only glimpse of him I’ve had so far, he was in a state of dishevelment. He was once an officer of His Majesty’s navy …. I don’t yet know how this man comes to be here, or all his history, let alone Thomas’s, and I hesitate to ask. The more I see, the less trust I have in my uncle’s papers, his official pronouncements. Of course there’s more than misfortune in Cousin Thomas’s situation, there’s wrongdoing in it, some grave sin on the part of … of Lady Hamilton, certainly, and the officer, but also perhaps Thomas himself as well. Yet, what could it be, that would bring my cousin and his supposed betrayer together again after so many lapsed years, in this queer manner? Is Thomas somehow beholden to the man?_

_One wants, with my cousin, to be delicate—for he himself is delicate, though a tall, robust man of no more than middle age—a fragility of some fabric that is still whole but could be worn out, torn through, with the merest additional use. I wish you were here, darling B, because_ you _would be able to talk to him with the lightness required to gain his confidence. I will imagine you by my side and try to speak to him as you would do._

_More anon._

~~~


	11. Eleven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alistair turned back to Thomas. “But I’m not Lord Ashbourne— In truth you are, and I would do anything required to clear your reputation, to re-establish you as the rightful earl.”
> 
> Thomas looked with focus at his cousin. “You are the earl. Of course you are. In order to help us, you have got to be, and … That life is yours. Whether you want it or not, there it is.” Thomas spoke softly, as he’d been doing all along, but James heard the undertow of his former authority, his old unquestioned sense of being in the right. “You must realize, Cousin, I will no longer be a Hamilton when I leave here. Lord Thomas Hamilton is no more. I will take up another name. I cease to be of noble rank, I cease to be … your cousin, in fact.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note that I made some small changes to chapters 9 and 10 with an added scene or two.
> 
> ~~~~~~

~~~

There came a rap on the door. Thomas turned away. “He is here.”

“Will you tell him everything?”

“We will feel our way.”

Having opened it, Thomas stood there, confronting his cousin, whom James couldn’t see, nor Thomas’s expression, in silence. James had determined he would stay in the background of this conversation, but he began to fear Thomas had gone off into one of his absences. He moved so that he could see around him to the gentleman in the doorway. The cousin who, though tall himself, had to look up into Thomas’s face, and who did so with an air of bafflement, inquiry, and just a little fear.

At last, Thomas not having moved, the young man doffed his hat and bowed self-consciously. “Alistair, sir. I am at your service.”   
  
James just touched Thomas’s elbow, which reminded him to step back. After a moment’s hesitation, Alistair entered the room. At once he began to look about, his gaze sliding past James, avoiding Thomas, taking in the details of where he found himself. He barely concealed his shock. What, James wondered, would this fellow make of the real inmate’s quarters—did he understand that this second-story room in the main house, with its ample windows, high ceiling, _wainscotting_ , was as far above those of the plantation’s regulars as the parlor of a West End London house was above its scullery?

Alistair held himself stiffly, one hand behind his back, the fingers of the other resting between the fastenings of his waistcoat. He, unlike Thomas and James, was not used to constant perspiring. Now that he’d surveyed the room, the young man brought his attention back to Thomas, but kept his silence. James suspected he was tongue-tied. Thomas, with a serenity, or at least, a patience, he’d learned in this place, made no effort to assist him. He knew how to stand still.

The young man cleared his throat. “The air here … I find it dusty.”

Neither Thomas nor James answered him.

“My lord … Cousin … I’d better begin by telling you, that your brother Edward is dead. It was mentioned yesterday, but I am not certain you took in what was spoken about at the time.”

Thomas nodded. “I heard. A hunting mishap. I’m sorry for him.”

Alistair waited, expecting some additional signal of emotion, but Thomas offered none.

“Once being informed that I was to succeed to the estate, I learned of the wrongs perpetuated against you by my uncle in his anger, and my cousin Edward in his willful ignorance. I want to put it right, so far as may be, and to atone.”

Alistair peered at Thomas, his anxiety mounting. Thomas meanwhile, seemed almost turned to stone, his attention fixed on something that was not in the room with them.

“I realize …” the young man ventured nervously, “that what you have lost cannot be restored. And I—"

Thomas made a gesture, and spoke as if he hadn’t heard his cousin’s stutterings. “Pardon me, for omitting to introduce—Lord Ashbourne, may I present you to Mr James … Mr James … well, we had better not mention any surnames. James is … my confidant. James, Lord Ashbourne.”

James put out a polite hand, and Alistair, gaping, grasped it. In his eyes was a battle playing out in which convention, religious training, embarrassment, shame at what he himself stood for, instinct, and the young man’s own will took part. It was in full pitch as they completed the handshake, and would be, James guessed, more or less of a draw.

Meanwhile he rolled the word _confidant_ around in his mind, and took it on. _I am that as well as other things_.

Alistair turned back to Thomas. “But I’m not Lord Ashbourne— In truth you are, and I would do anything required to clear your reputation, to re-establish you as the rightful earl.”

Thomas, again seemed to be far off. James’s memory threw up in all vividness that passage in Peter Ashe’s house, when he had made up his mind to return to London, to admit to being Flint, to confess all and ask for pardon. He’d believed he could do it, though the plan required all his fortitude against the dread of it—and then Miranda, furious, righteous, observant Miranda—had seen what she’d seen, and spoken out. The report of that bullet still repeated in his head from time to time, loud, sudden, making his flesh crawl, making every muscle in his body cry out.

After that he’d given no further thought to the aborted plan of asking for the Empire’s mercy or clearing the name of McGraw. He’d never consider it again—indeed, it was madness, a plan made in desperation that was nothing but a futile fantasy from the first moment they’d conceived of it.

Yet, for Thomas … for Thomas it could be different. What if Thomas, with the support of the heir, were to reappear, to reclaim his rights, after a decade’s disappearance? Done with sufficient confidence and vigor, the shock—and the gossip—could be faced, would probably, all told, be brief.

As for himself, he could assume some lowly role—a commoner made friend during the long confinement, also restored from his gentle madness and released to companion the resurrected lord. He might even pose as Thomas’s valet—what better excuse to be always on hand, and never much noticed? As such, and if they lived quietly in the country, the chances of anyone ever connecting him with the pirate who’d slain Thomas’s father was slight.

“Sir, it’s not too late,” Alistair continued. “You … you need not involve yourself again the affairs of the Empire, or take your seat in the Lords, but there is much scope for activity in your own properties. And, you are in the prime of life. You could raise a family.”

Thomas grimaced. “My wife is dead.”

“I know. I only meant, you could easily marry again, and the solace of children—”

“The solace of children.” Thomas repeated the phrase, and looked at James. “The Sol. Ace. Of. Chil. Dren.”

After a horrible moment of silence, James said, “Bethink yourself of other persuasions, Lord Hamilton.”

Alistair was eyeing them now in a way that made it pretty plain what he was thinking, or not knowing how to think about: that these two men were each involved with Miranda Hamilton, and that one had cruelly betrayed the other. Yet here they were together.

Thomas revived, and looked with focus at his cousin. “You are the earl. Of course you are. In order to help us, you have got to be, and … That life is yours. Whether you want it or not, there it is.” Thomas spoke softly, as he’d been doing all along, but James heard the undertow of his former authority, his old unquestioned sense of being in the right. “You must realize, Cousin, I will no longer be a Hamilton when I leave here. Lord Thomas Hamilton is no more. I will take up another name. I cease to be of noble rank, I cease to be … your cousin, in fact.”

“Another name. Yes. Yes, I see why you say so.” Alistair nodded unconsciously amidst a tangle of thoughts, his fingers going to his lips, retreating, returning. He seemed to recall something, and his expression became a little more resolute.

Thomas said, “I neglected to thank you for coming all this way to see about me. Do take a chair. Tell us about yourself.”

“Tell … ?” Alistair stared, and as Thomas continued to point mildly towards one of the chairs, he dropped into it.

“Did I understand,” Thomas said, “that you are a member of the clergy?”

“Just barely.” Alistair squeezed his hands together.

“Were you to have the living at Ashbourne? That would have been very nice. Such a delicious view from the rectory, as I recall.”

“Y-y-yes. I’m to be married next year, to my Betsy. That is, to Mistress Elizabeth Treetorn.” Alistair fumbled at his waistcoat pocket, and brought out a gold case, offering it to Thomas. Thomas took it slowly, opening it, his gaze rather blank.

“That … is she,” Alistair explained. “Not a perfect likeness.”

“Ah,” Thomas said. “How pretty. See it, my dear?” He offered it to James, who stepped closer to look. The _my dear_ seemed to ring through the room like a clear silver bell. It made Alistair start. James looked at the little portrait, thinking that though he might never meet her, this young lady could have some considerable influence over his and Thomas’s lives, going forward.

“She is not at all silly,” Alistair put in eagerly. “I fear some may believe the painter made her look a bit silly, but she is not, I assure you—she is, in every way—” He smiled foolishly. But the smile faded instantly, and as James handed him back the miniature, he gave him a look to which challenge had returned.

Thomas, seeming not to notice it, said, “Will she like being a countess?” and James wasn’t sure if there wasn’t a tease in his expression, though it continued to be a little detached. “I hope she’ll prefer it to being the incumbent’s wife. The duties are different but probably no less heavy. Though if she likes nice clothes, as not all ladies do, though it’s the general prejudice about the sex, it’s certainly preferable to being the parson’s lady. There’s great scope for dressing up, for the countess.”

Alistair’s eyes went wide. “She … she will be surprised. She was certain, you see, when we parted, that I was to bring you back to resume your rightful place yourself. We couldn’t imagine that anything else would come of my … embassy.”

“But she will take it in stride, I suppose? I think most young ladies don’t mind becoming countesses.”

Alistair nodded, panting a little. “She is always prepared to do her duty, whatever that may be.” Then he burst out with, “The thing is, sir, the thing is! I’m uneasy about the deception, sir.”

“Deception?” Thomas said, turning to look at James with eyes that were suddenly burning with pain. “My love, he doesn’t care for deception.”

It took a moment for Alistair to realize that what he’d said had rent the fine web of their politesse; he rose from the chair even as Thomas pushed away from them, putting himself at the window with his back turned.

“I …” Alistair wrung his hands. “That was foolish.”

James was missing his weapons, missing violence. Wanting to plunge into persuasive narration, to just take and make a scene over with a compelling story into what he willed it to be. That wasn’t his prerogative here. “Naïve, maybe,” he drawled.

The young man turned red. “I am that. I am that.” He fumbled. “Of course we’ll speak no more about the title. I will assume the title, and I will use every resource to place you both … and furnish you with … and secrecy. Utmost discretion and secrecy. I know it to be my solemn responsibility. I set no conditions—make no queries—”

He would, James could see, like to make them. He was stuffed full of speculations, didn’t want to believe the evidence of his own eyes and ears, didn’t quite want to just smoothly accept that this cousin he was rescuing from the unthinkable abyss came with a sodomitical companion, equally unthinkable, in tow. But to his credit, he was holding back all but that expression in his gaze, when he glanced at James, and wondered at their talk.

“You have only to tell me what you should like, and it will be done.”

At the window, with his forehead against the pane, James couldn’t tell if he was looking out, or inward, or if his eyes were shut. What was it like, he wondered, for Thomas to hear those reasonable words, after all that had happened to him? There was almost an insult in it, that such an outrageous protracted wrong should be put away so easily, so simply. Did that young man have any idea, how little difference one could really make with restorations, allowances, ease and comforts?

  
Or, thought James, it’s only I who wants to bare my teeth at any reparation, who wants to snarl and snap at anything that will distract Thomas from myself? Do I want to stay here with him in this room forever, is that it? Where there is no one for him to engage with more important than myself? No world for him to re-enter? Is this really jealousy I feel?

He wasn’t used to such much uncertainty. James went to Thomas, laid a hand on his shoulder. Murmured. “Talk to me.”

“I tire so easily.”

“Is that it? Should you like to lie down?”

James placed himself so that when Thomas turned to him, their faces weren’t visible to the onlooker. James wasn’t ready for how Thomas regarded him, the weight of concern passing quickly between them, so that Thomas laid a supporting arm around James’s shoulders even as the air rushed out of his lungs.

Thomas said, “My love, don’t be afraid.”

“I am afraid,” James whispered. Their faces were close together. Thomas laid his mouth against James’s temple, and against his cheek.

“It’s almost over. We are almost there,” Thomas said. “What say you to relying on me now for a while?” He was holding him now, and James found that his head rested on his shoulder, and he didn’t care that the animation had all gone out of himself. Though they were still in this room, on this plantation, something was finished. He knew it for certain.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw their faint reflection in the window, two age-roughened men in undefended embrace. Thomas smiled that seraphic smile that James had come to associate with his penetration into far parts of the mind.

They were not, in their mirror picture, figures of belief or war or politics, as men were when conjoined in paintings and tapestries. He saw just an image of love and comfort exchanged.

From the far side of the room, Alistair Hamilton cleared his throat.

Thomas straightened and looked at his cousin over James’s head. “I should like to go back to Ashbourne. To see it in the spring. Even if only for a day. If we depart this soon, we will reach it in time for that.”

Alistair, taking out his surprise on the brim of his hat, said, “Only to visit Ashbourne? And what else?”

“We’ll decide then.” Thomas gave James a squeeze. “As my confident, what say you to that?”

“It’ll do to begin with,” James said. Stunned, but willing.

“Yes,” Thomas agreed, shining again at his cousin. “It’ll do to begin with.”

After standing awkwardly waiting for something more from either of them, Alistair at last donned his hat. “Well, there is much to be attended to. I will inform the warden that we will all quit this place forever in a day or two.”

~~~


	12. Twelve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thomas went to James at the window. “What are you thinking?”
> 
> “How we shall call ourselves when we depart from here.”

_We will all quit this place forever_. The words seemed to keep repeating, though their speaker was gone, and Thomas and James were alone. The door to the room stood open. James was still at the window, gazing out in an apparent daze.

_We will all quit this place forever._ Thomas eyed the open door. The last few years, as one of the most trusted ones, he’d been allowed, on Sunday afternoons, and on long summer evenings after supper, to walk about the estate as he pleased, in company with those who shared the privilege, or on his own. He’d followed all its directions, come up against all its fences, walls, and barriers. It was hemmed in by swamps and damp woods on two sides, and Thomas had been told, what all the inmates were told, the stories of the men who’d tried to escape through the wet tangle, who’d been hunted down with dogs and retrieved, or who had died trying. The men liked to tell about some fellow who’d been found hanging in the cluttered foliage, with no way to tell if by accident or suicide; they’d take turns describing the desolate horror of the scene, as if they’d seen the dead man’s bulging face for themselves.

He’d strolled, countless times, the stone perimeter wall beside the dirt road that led to Savannah, too high to see over. He’d heard the tramplings of horses, the groaning of carts, and bits of conversations as people went by. He could have stood by the plantation’s gate, observed what was going by, and even been seen, but he never did approach the gate. Nothing stopped him except his own proclivity. He’d look at it from a distance. No memory of coming through attached to it; he’d been brought to the plantation after dark, and in a great state of confusion after the agony of the sea voyage, the endless dread of what his life had become, since he’d been dragged into this abyss.

The plantation, he thought now, was not so bad. Not so bad as what he’d feared, when they’d taken him out of Bedlam and put him on a ship for America. Here he hadn’t been starved, mocked, chained. No “cures” had been tried on him. The impositions were not cruelties, so much as boredoms. The work was no harder than what men did in every nation on earth, and had the advantage of being practical, and productive. The illnesses he’d endured had been his own to pick up, not imposed on him by Mr Oglethorpe and his staff, and they’d always done what they could to keep him from dying of them. Unlike at Eton, he hadn’t been beaten, fiddled with, frozen, told off, or made to compose Greek verse.

What, after all, would have happened, he wondered, if his father had let them be? Would they have gone, the three of them, to Nassau, to govern it? All that part of him that had felt his own power, which he’d imagined to be tempered with reason, and sense, and good will, that had believed it was his to wield in the purpose of right and good order … all that part of him … was only a memory that made him squirm. When, a few years into his incarceration, he’d understood that his duty to administrate and impose his will had been taken from him once and for all, he’d been struck with a deep depression, a shame that forced him low. When at last it cleared, he knew, finally, relief. He need not pretend to have authority ever again. He need not worry about persuading, imposing, governing.

Had they gone there, with their pardons, their earnestness that they did not see for the arrogance it was, their clandestine passions, the three of them, would they really have made some private little paradise on the empire’s edge?

Thomas would never bring that up to James. They would talk about Miranda, they would talk about many things, but that, that, must be unspeakable. It curdled his heart, even to ponder it this much.

Thomas went to James at the window. “What are you thinking?”

“How we shall call ourselves when we depart from here.”

“Mr Darby and Mr Joan—wasn’t that decided?”

“That will be too obvious, don’t you think?” James said, letting solemnity substitute for a chuckle.

“I suppose Mr Smith and Mr Jones, or Mr White and Mr Black, are also out of the question.”

“I’ve considered them and let them lie.”

“Mmm,” Thomas said. He laid a hand on the nape of James’s neck, and James pressed himself back against him.

After a while, Thomas said, “It’s been safe here, you see. In a queer way. I find myself thinking of that now. I find myself thinking all sorts of rum things.”

James threaded his fingers through Thomas’s dangling hand.

“I don’t mean I want to stay here.”

“I’ll do everything to make you safe with me,” James said.

“I know. And I’ll do everything to keep you from having to draw upon those dangerous skills of yours.” Thomas turned him, embracing him fully, and tipped James’s chin up to kiss him.

After a while, James said, “And what are _you_ thinking?”

“Of darling Miranda. I recall how I told her—when I asked for her hand—that I would keep her safe.” Thomas’s laugh was nostalgic. “It was among many items I offered in that conversation.”

“It’s odd,” James said, “after all this time, to be in ignorance—but I don’t know how it is you and Miranda were matched.”

“She never told you?” Thomas looked at him for a long moment with amusement in his eyes, that shaded away into something else. They were still holding each other. Then Thomas drew him along to sit on the foot of the bed. “Well, it was like this. I was twenty-one, down from the ‘varsity and enjoying my London, according to my own bent. A friend of my mother steered me towards her. Miranda was, at the time, Lady _____, her husband being some thirty years her senior. She was, as you know, a little older than me. She enjoyed a reputation in society as a wit, and a flirt … and in short, was thought by my mother’s friend to be the sort of married lady who would, as my mistress, impart to me some final polish before I should look around me for a wife.” Thomas raised his eyebrows at James’s expression. “There was nothing considered untoward in this. Even now, I see that you are suspicious of the ways of the aristocracy.”

“I happen to have a good friend from that circle,” James said, with a smirk.

“You do, though he’s gone far away from it. As I said, I was introduced to her, and as you know for yourself, to meet Miranda was to be enchanted with her. I never knew if my mother’s friend had also spoken to her of me. At any event, we formed, as it seems in my memory, an instantaneous _rapport_. All of my enthusiasms and purposes became her own. I … rather took her admiration of me for granted as my due. At the same time, I was equally delighted by her mind, which was in some ways even more developed than my own.”

Thomas made a rueful moue. “I was—am—a great egoist.”

“Never mind that,” said James.

“Miranda, being very worldly—and loving to hear gossip as much as anyone—was already aware of my own proclivity towards members of our sex. She took it rather for a merry challenge—she promised to expand my horizons, was her tease. At the same time, she was not averse to comparing notes on … you can imagine. She was all that was friendly, not at all … not at all … well, you know her. Her husband turned a blind eye on her private life, and in the way of our milieu, our liaison was indulged by our society, that is, we were invited to all the same country house parties by knowing hostesses. For more than a year, we spent a great deal of time together. We talked as … you know how we talked … and we read books, played cards, visited ruins, rode to hounds, wrote poems, made up riddles, sang songs …. As for lovemaking, I did all my youthful gameness allowed me to do—which was indeed more than I’d have thought myself capable of in a lady’s bed. Miranda was lovely and knew how to seduce. But soon it was less than could deeply satisfy herself. Our best exchanges were when, she liking very much the sight of me all naked and aroused, I handled myself as she watched, and she did likewise. I don’t know how long this would have continued—her status as my official mistress, that is, for I knew even at the time that she had encounters with other men who were readier than I to … to … you know what she liked. Then Lord ____ died. So much older as he was, he wasn’t much above sixty years of age, and his death was unexpected. Will it surprise you that it did not seem to me untoward at the time, nor afterwards, that I gave Miranda my condolence and my marriage proposal at the same meeting? Of course we waited a year for her mourning, but we were engaged from that day. In the understanding that our union was to be a partnership, a friendship, and a place of security for each of us to be our true selves.”

“And how did your milieu take it when you announced that your mistress was to be your wife?”

Thomas glanced away. “My father did not like the idea at all, knowing her reputation. Nor that she was my elder, and a widow. But she was Lady ____, had no child, and was rich, so there was no real objection that could be made. As for the rest of our society, many thought it funny, and predicted that our friendship, which had been much remarked upon, would, in wedlock, go smash. But as you know, Miranda had many friends, as did I, and on the whole our sort of people are never displeased when a man and a woman who are titled, rich and good-looking tie the knot.” He mused. “While we agreed that we would each grant the other the latitude to form other associations, we also very much wanted a child—and my father made it clear he was watching for the appearance of a grandson.

We were quite diligent over it for a year … Miranda reserved herself exclusively to our effort during that time … Later on I indicated to her that any child of hers should be unquestionably mine as well … But it was not to be. She never conceived.”

James thought of their unseen daughter. How he wished now, that she had a name. That he’d returned in time to see her, hold her, even dead. Had she lived, would he have gone about things at Nassau differently?

Probably not. Almost certainly not. And what could have become of her, had she lived? She might be orphaned now, lost. She was safest where she was, nameless, beneath the simple stone.

Thomas was regarding him.

“Miranda did … wish to be a mother,” James murmured. “That was one amidst her sorrows.”


	13. Thirteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It will take a long time, for us to stop hurting. Probably it will never happen,” Thomas said. “But I’ll help you.”
> 
> The final chapter.

Apparently exhausted by the talk about Miranda, Thomas threw himself onto the bed, and was almost instantly asleep, as if he’d drunk some heavy draught. James felt, and accepted, a reproach in it. Quietly, he shut the door of the room, propping one of the chairs beneath the knob, and then stretched out alongside Thomas’s back. None of the amazement had passed away, every nerve of his body thrilled to the crazy joy of being close to Thomas. James let his head fall a little forward on the thin pillow, so his face rested against Thomas’s nape. Somehow, he thought, after all this fighting, all this rage and transgression over Thomas’s honor and his own, the outcome—he blanched at the notion of ‘reward’—ought not to be this reunion. Some deep punishment must be in store, from the God of their fathers. The God of himself and Thomas, in whose image they had been made … if such a God existed … had too little power here, He was too little regarded and could not protect them.

James awoke in the dark to Thomas’s kisses. He was half on top of him already, humid, pressing, imploring. James sighed with relief.

“Get these off.” They wrestled with their clothes. The window shutters were open onto blank night—invisible clouds covered the stars, there was no moon. Thomas and the bed were black shapes against black. James found him fully aroused. Skimming hands over flesh made them both shimmer, groan. 

They were already misted in sweat; in a little while, it would pour off them. Thomas’s hands touched him everywhere at first, and then in specific places, in specific ways that were searingly familiar. 

After a while, as they stirred higher and higher, Thomas whispered, “Shall I?”

“Go on.”

They repeatedly spat into their hands, to slick up. Thomas’s panting breath filled the dark. As he twisted about in response to Thomas’s inciting touches and whispers, James’s mind hurdled back to his earliest memory of the act. His initiation into this act had taken place in a high wide bed, with an assurance of hours of privacy, fine linen, glimmering candlelight, champagne, piles of silken pillows, and a perfumed oil from a slender flask that Thomas deployed to make the difference between mere wild willingness and accomplishment. Even so there’d been a shock to it. After the shock eased into desperate pleasure, into repeated desire, he’d never forgotten that panicked sensation of being entered, overwhelmed, then giving way. The recollection of it came always with a perverse kind of pride. 

They weren’t together long enough for any aspect of their love to grow stale.

Was Thomas recalling that too? He paused, James heard him chuckle. “I’m too eager for you.” Then his breath expelled at the bottom of James’s spine, his mouth and tongue followed, in flourishes at first languid and then urgent, making him curl and crush the pillow in his teeth. Again they spat into their palms; the wet crown of Thomas’s cock felt enormous in his fingers as he steered it towards its target. James too was breathing like a racer now. But it wasn’t enough for entry. He flipped them over; astride Thomas’s belly, he hesitated, thought of striking a light. If he could see him, perhaps then …. They rocked together, frustratedly, Thomas’s big hands encompassing him, teasing, caressing, sweat dripping, everything wet, not wet enough. Rising up on his knees, arching his back, James tried again to take him in. His body was in a daze of arousal, but he couldn’t do it. Beneath him, Thomas let out a puppyish whine. 

James swore, then laughed. “I am out of practice for this undertaking. Had I but any slush about me—”

After a pause, “You needn’t say so, only to please me,” Thomas said. 

“Only it’s true.” His face grew hot at the admission he’d have preferred to keep to himself; James felt foolish, angry, bemused. “I was in no state of mind—"

An image thrust itself upon him, which he rejected too late, the door barred after the horse has escaped. He’d never let himself contemplate approaching Silver that way, at least, not for so long as it took to recognize the shape of the encroaching thought. He wouldn’t have, he’d told himself, even had there been any encouragement. But there hadn’t been, not a glance, not a hint. Begone, you. 

All at once the air, and their bodies, were altered. Thomas touched his face, felt gently over James’s lips, his indrawn cheeks, his closed eyelids. palmed his mouth, catching what was almost a grunt, almost a sob. 

“Don’t move, my dear. I will make a light.”

“No.”

“But I want you to look at me.”

This wasn’t the reply James expected. He waited as Thomas fumbled for the tinderbox. He struck, struck again; the candle flame appeared, and moved as Thomas lifted and brought it between them. Behind it, his face was a white disk, the eyes open wide, their blue the only color anywhere.

Helplessly, James said, “I will always look at you.” He was blushing all over, but he couldn’t look.

Patiently, Thomas said, “I am mourning your pleasure.”

James flinched.

“I mean, all that you haven’t had since we were parted. That you ought to have had. With me, and also without me.”

This notion brought up a cold ire in James that killed desire—for love, and even for talking. He turned away. Thomas, knelt beside him, went on holding up the candle, continued to focus on him, await him. “I’m mourning my Jem McGraw. Mourning Captain Flint. Mourning _you_ , James unnamed, who are becoming—and whom I love.”

The words crushed out. “Love without question?”

“Love with many questions. Infinite questions.” Thomas leaned closer, coaxing, charming, against his rage. James could feel the heat of the candleflame, and also of Thomas’s skin, radiating, redolent. “Don’t be angry at me for my pity. It’s not the kind that ought to make you angry. It’s for your deprivation. I love you so.”

“I’m not—”

“It will take a long time, for us to stop hurting. Probably it will never happen,” Thomas said. “But I’ll help you.”

James forced himself to look at Thomas, barely blinking, full of remorse and backed up hope, before he reached up with thumb and finger to snuff the flame. In the sudden dark, his rage could break forth into livid gulping tears. 

Thomas, moving slowly, covered him with his body, gathering and pressing down upon him, whispering. James curved up against him, felt himself whimpering, didn’t try to stop. The blush shed its shame, took on need. Everything was slowed down. James felt Thomas’s steady reassuring pulse everywhere. Each exhalation made him calmer. After a long time, he turned slowly onto his back, Thomas still right there, drawing him close, his open mouth there, kissing. Hands entwined, then breaking to caress, and seizing again, they kissed for another long time; the night having graciously paused for them, so that they could complete this obeisance at their own pace. Shuddering, borne along by little convulsions of happiness, so long unknown, James laughed breathlessly.

“My beau Jem. My dear. Returned to me. My darling James.” Thomas’s voice seemed to come from far away, or not that, but … long ago. Those endearments that, along with so much else discovered with this unlooked-for noble lover, had shaken James, made him uncertain, almost insulted, then made him yearn and exult with an exultation he felt he must conceal. Attached him with a desperate adoration and gratitude. Undid and remade him.

In his mind, he glimpsed Silver again, his back turned, diminishing, diminishing.

Heart soaring, James said, “Tom, now. Come into me now.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

They took it slowly, shifting, wriggling, gasping. Sunk in, Thomas paused for a long time, his mouth close to James’s. James felt he was listening, realized he himself was holding his breath. Inhaling deeply, James moved against him. Something changed again, and time sped up.

~~~

Later that day, they were visited again by the young Lord Hamilton, who saw personally to their being outfitted in gentleman’s attire. 

No prisoner could witness this departure. They spent some hours in the plantation house’s best parlor, in almost complete silence and great awareness of the imposition of layers of cloth, with the aid of a pack of cards and some yellowed issues of the Tatler, and dined with him that evening in the dining room. Mrs Oglethorpe had seen that her three guests were treated as if at an ample supper party, but neither she nor her husband made an appearance. After the dessert there was port wine. 

They were waiting for eleven o’clock, when every inmate would have been abed for an hour, and all would be still. Then they would embark for Savannah, and Lord Hamilton’s ship.

When at length the clock hand stood at a quarter-to, James murmured, “Will you take a last look round?”

“There’s nothing here I wish to remember, except for your arrival,” Thomas said, laying a hand on his sleeve for a moment. 

The servant beckoned them then into the entry hall. Before a mirror lit with candles, he handed them their new hats. Thomas had been shaved a few hours ago, for the first time in the decade, and the skin felt tender and assaulted; when he glanced in the mirror, he saw someone wearing a kind of carnival mask, of two different tones, top and bottom, so white were his cheeks and chin; he was afrighted before he remembered that it was only himself. Hurriedly he looked away, the heavy felt hat slipping from his hand.

James stooped to pick it up. “We’ll get you a better one, bye and bye,” he said, looking into Thomas’s eyes as he fitted it with both hands on his head. “It’s not so bad.”

The front door stood open. Thomas heard the gravel crunch beneath the carriage wheels, and then in the flaring light of the flambeaux attached to the porch pillars, it drew up. When they were inside it, and it rattled off into the darkness, where would they go? He couldn’t for the moment remember; his vision was awash. He felt someone’s steadying hand on his elbow. In the parlor behind him, the clock struck its eleven notes.

Thomas blinked, and saw Mr Oglethorpe. He stood quietly, in a bright silk suit that glowed in the candlelight, and the wig he must reserve for only the most important occasions. Shaking hands with Lord Hamilton, they exchanged a few words Thomas couldn’t hear.

Then Mr Oglethorpe approached him. “I hope you didn’t think I’d omit to say goodbye to you, Thomas.”

“I … didn’t think of you at all.”

The man’s eyes widened, but otherwise he made no reaction. “I won’t then offer to shake your hand, sir. I will only wish you, and Mr—Mr—wish you both Godspeed.”

The impulse to courtesy that lived in Thomas strongly prompted him to offer his hand, even some thanks. Thanks for … what? Hospitality? Shelter? Lack of ill treatment? He didn’t hate Mr Oglethorpe, but he could not wish him well in his endeavors.

“It was kind of you,” Thomas said, “to lend me your Dutch picture.”

Mr Oglethorpe’s mouth opened. After a strange pause, he said, “Will you take it with you, sir, as … as a remembrance? I shall fetch it for you at once.”

Shuddering, Thomas looked away. 

The hand tightened on his elbow; he let himself be led across the threshold, into the bright light of the flambeaux, across the porch boards, down the three steps towards the sound of the horses stamping, the carriage creaking on its springs. There it stood, its lanterns shaded, door open. 

Thomas hesitated, suddenly blank. What was this? What was this? He stepped back on his heel, froze.

Then he saw James, who moved around to face him, still holding his arm, looking into his eyes, with that quirked up half smile he always used to recall with such an ache. Such an ache. 

James whispered, “Shall we go, my lord?”

“Is it all right?”

“This equipage is here for us. Your cousin is already inside. We’re going together.”

Still facing him, James stepped backwards up into the vehicle, his open hand outstretched all the while. Thomas seized it, climbed in, fell back in the seat. It was dark within, but he knew James’s hand, its shape and pressure, its steadfastness. He held to it, and the carriage rolled.

~THE END ~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Peasant, who told me about "slush".


End file.
